The renovation budget tracker built for UK homeowners

Industry surveys regularly find that UK renovation projects overrun budget by 20–30% on average. The honest causes are rarely the headline ones — it isn't usually a single catastrophic discovery. It's a slow accumulation: a £400 extra here, a £900 spec change there, three rounds of fittings that drifted upmarket, and a sub-floor that needed replacing once the old kitchen came out. Without a tracker, none of these show up as problems until the cumulative number lands.

A spreadsheet can do the maths, but spreadsheets don't tell you "you're three weeks away from running out of kitchen budget." They don't tie an actual payment to the task that authorised it. And they don't survive a renovation where the kitchen fitter emails you a revised quote, your partner buys taps off Howdens, and you pay the electrician in cash on a Friday afternoon. The reason renovations need a dedicated budget tracker — not a project management tool, not a spreadsheet — is that real money is moving in many directions at once and the system has to keep up.

There are four jobs a budget tracker has to handle if it's going to be useful for a real UK renovation:

• Category-level allocation. Total budget split across kitchen, bathrooms, structural, electrics, plumbing, finishes, and contingency — with allowed-overage thresholds per category, not just a single bottom-line number.
• Per-task cost capture. When a task gets done, attach what it cost. The tracker should pull the actual cost from where the task was completed, not from a separate reconciliation later.
• Supplier-level totals. See how much you've actually paid the builder, the electrician, and the kitchen fitter to date — and how much remains under their quote. This is where most disputes start, and where most overruns hide.
• Real-time visibility on phones. If you can only see your budget on a laptop at the end of the day, you'll miss the on-site decisions that drive cost. RenoTrack runs as a PWA so the live budget is in your pocket.

RenoTrack was built around these four jobs. The default budget categories match the way UK renovations are actually scoped — not the way Trello columns are organised.

A few realities only show up in UK renovations: VAT is rarely transparent up-front (builders quote ex-VAT, kitchen retailers quote inc-VAT, and that gap matters when you're planning); building control fees are often a line item people forget; and the planning-permission process can introduce two-month delays that need budget set aside for storage, temporary accommodation, or contractor retention. RenoTrack lets you add custom categories for any of these and tag costs as VAT-inclusive or exclusive, so the totals you see in the dashboard match the totals on your invoices.

It also handles the slow-bleed costs that wreck budgets late in a project: skips and waste removal, parking suspensions, scaffolding extensions, professional fees for structural engineers and architects, and the "while we're at it" jobs that come out of consultations between you and the builder. Capture them in the right category and they stop hiding.

Tracking on its own is just bookkeeping. What makes RenoTrack useful is that the budget connects to every other part of the project: the task list, the suppliers, the schedule. When the plumber requests a change order, you can see in seconds whether your plumbing allocation has room. When the kitchen quote comes in £2,000 above estimate, you can see where else you could trim to keep the bottom line intact — and which categories you shouldn't touch.

The AI-powered project planner gives you a sensible starting allocation based on the description you provide (kitchen extension in Bristol, £40k budget, 12 weeks). You can override anything — the AI is a starting point, not a constraint — but most homeowners save several hours of category-by-category guessing on the initial setup alone. From there, the tracker keeps the picture current without you doing extra admin: when you mark a task as done with its actual cost, the dashboard updates.

The end result is that the question "are we still on budget?" stops being a once-a-month, stomach-churning exercise. It's just a glance at the dashboard.