Estimate against actual, room by room. Builder and contractor bids compared on true all-in cost instead of headline price. A change-order log that revises the budget line it affects, and a contingency meter that turns amber before your bank account does.
It works in any currency and in any country. The currency is a dropdown of eleven codes on the Setup tab, or your own symbol typed in, and every money heading and both chart axes follow it. No tax rate, no permit regime and nobody else’s prices are written into the arithmetic.
€13one-time · not on sale yet
Checkout is not open yet, so this file cannot be bought today. When it opens, checkout and delivery are handled by our payment processor and the download link appears as soon as payment clears. No account, no subscription.
It goes in small amounts, in three places, over months. The workbook is built around those three.
One contractor includes materials, one does not, one absorbs the permit fee. The cheapest base bid is often the most expensive job. The Quote Comparison tab normalises all three to a true all-in cost before you sign anything.
Verbal changes add up to a number you first meet on the final invoice. Log each one, mark it approved, and the revised budget on the line it affects moves with it.
Most people set a contingency and never look at it again. The dashboard tile turns amber once 75% of the buffer is committed, and red when scope growth has eaten the lot.
A homeowner's tool, written from the side that pays the invoices.
Six linked tabs. Nothing hidden, locked or password protected.
One page: what to fill in first, what each tab is for, how to import into Google Sheets, and how to clear the sample project.
Project name, dates, total budget, and a contingency percentage validated to 5–30% so a stray keystroke cannot quietly break the meter. The rooms, trades and statuses are ordinary editable lists. Overwrite them with your own.
The master sheet. One row per piece of work, 200 of them, with your estimate, the contracted price, approved changes, what has been paid and what is left. Most of the row is formulas. Empty rows look empty instead of showing a wall of zeros.
Twenty blocks of three bids. Enter the base bid, whether materials are in it, the permit and disposal fees and the timeline. The block gives you a true all-in cost per bidder and names the best value in writing, which is usually not the cheapest bid.
Two registers on one tab. Approved change orders flow into the revised budget of the line they hit; rejected ones grey out and stay on the record. Underneath, 300 payment rows, where an invoice reference entered twice is highlighted in amber.
Revised budget, paid to date, contingency remaining and percent complete by spend, over a room table, a trade table and two charts. The contingency tile changes colour on its own as the buffer goes.
From the sample project the file ships with. Every number here is sample data you type over.
| Format | One .xlsx workbook, 6 tabs. No macros, no add-ins, nothing to install. |
|---|---|
| Works in | Excel 2010 or later (Windows and Mac), Google Sheets via File › Import › Replace spreadsheet, and LibreOffice Calc. Only cross-compatible formulas are used: SUMIF, SUMIFS, INDEX/MATCH, COUNTIF. |
| Capacity | 200 budget lines, 20 quote comparison blocks of 3 bids each, 100 change orders, 300 payments. |
| Charts | Two: estimate versus paid by room, and paid by trade. Both native spreadsheet charts that survive the Google Sheets import. |
| Currency | A dropdown on the Setup tab (EUR, GBP, USD, CAD, AUD, CHF, SEK, NOK, DKK, PLN, NZD), plus a cell for a symbol that is not on the list. Every money heading and both chart axes follow it. Not one cell carries a hard-coded currency, so nothing goes stale when you switch. |
| Sample data | A complete 12-month project, “Maple Street House”, with 34 budget lines, 6 change orders and a full payment history. Clearing it is a documented two-minute job. |
| Delivery | Not on sale yet. When checkout opens: instant download after payment, no account to create. |
| Price and updates | €13 once, with no subscription. There is no update service: what you download is the file as it stands on the day you buy it. If we ever publish a corrected version of a file you already bought, email us and we will send it. |
| Licence | Buy once, use it on your own projects for as long as you like. Not for resale or redistribution. See the terms. |
| Support | Email support@vendwright.com and you will get a fix or a straight answer. |
No, and be wary of anything that claims to for your street. The workbook holds no price data. You enter your own quotes; it does the tracking and the arithmetic. If you want a planning number before the quotes arrive, the free renovation contingency calculator will size a buffer for you.
Yes. Open Sheets, choose File › Import › Upload, pick the file and select “Replace spreadsheet”. Every formula is from the cross-compatible set, so the dropdowns, conditional colours and both charts come across. There are no macros to be stripped out, because there are none.
Yes. They are ordinary lists on the Setup tab, and they feed every dropdown in the workbook. Type over the entries. One rule: blank a row rather than deleting it, or the list shrinks under the dropdowns.
Most home projects use 30 to 60. If you really need more, copy the last row down and widen the SUM ranges on the Dashboard, which is a find-and-replace of one row number. It is a chore. 200 lines is a deliberate ceiling rather than a technical limit.
You set a total budget and a contingency percentage on Setup, and the contingency amount is calculated from those two. The Dashboard tile then subtracts the amount your revised budget has grown beyond your original estimates, in other words the approved change orders. The tile turns amber when less than 25% of the buffer is left and red when the growth exceeds it.
It is there so you can see a filled-in project behave before you trust it with yours. The Instructions tab names the ranges to clear, it takes a couple of minutes, and nothing breaks: the formula columns are not part of what you delete.
Not as a separate calculated column. Enter your quotes the way you received them. If they are tax-inclusive, the whole workbook is tax-inclusive and stays consistent. Mixing inclusive and exclusive quotes in the same budget is the one thing that will mislead you, and no template can fix that for you.
It opens in the Google Sheets and Excel mobile apps, and logging a payment on site works fine. Reading a 13-column budget table on a phone does not. It is laid out for a laptop screen.
It is a digital file that downloads instantly, so it cannot be returned in the usual sense. If it does not do what this page says it does, email support@vendwright.com and you will get your money back without an argument. Full detail on the refunds page.
Not yet. It is a new product and we are not going to invent any. The screenshots above are the real file, the specifications table is exact, and the free calculator shows you how we think before you spend anything.
One .xlsx file, six tabs, no macros, no subscription. €13, and a refund if it is not what this page described.