A renovation cost tracker that connects costs to the work that produced them

When you start a renovation you plan for the obvious costs: builder, kitchen, bathroom, materials. The ones that wreck budgets are the second tier:

• Skips and waste removal (£200–£400 per skip, often three or four needed)
• Scaffolding rental, especially if work runs long (£600–£2,000 per month)
• Parking suspensions and council permits in urban areas
• Storage costs while rooms are unusable
• Temporary accommodation if part of the house is uninhabitable
• Architect, structural engineer, and quantity surveyor professional fees
• Planning portal fees, Building Control fees, certificates
• Cleaning costs at the end of every phase
• Restocking trips for materials that didn't ship correctly
• Snagging costs — the small fixes that pile up at the end

Each one is a small percentage. Together they routinely add 5–10% to a budget that otherwise looked fine. RenoTrack's category system handles all of these by default, and you can add custom categories for anything specific to your project.

The single most useful view in a renovation cost tracker is "how much have I paid this supplier vs how much remains under their quote?" That number tells you whether a trade is over-extracting, whether you're heading for a dispute, and whether the project is moving at the pace the schedule needs.

RenoTrack tracks costs against the supplier they paid as well as the category and task. So you can see, in one place, that the kitchen fitter is at 80% of quote with 30% of work remaining — which is a real warning sign. Or that the electrician quoted £4,200 and you've paid £5,100, which means you've already approved change orders worth checking.

This visibility is hard to get from a spreadsheet because a spreadsheet doesn't know that an invoice from "Wright Bros Plumbing Ltd" is the same supplier as the one called "Mike the plumber" in your task assignments. RenoTrack does, because the system connects them.

The reason most homeowners do retroactive cost tracking — reconcile receipts once a month — isn't because real-time tracking is hard. It's because the tools weren't set up for the way costs actually arrive in a renovation: at random times, from different channels, often in cash or on the phone. RenoTrack makes real-time tracking the default by letting you log a cost in seconds from your phone, attach a photo of the receipt, and tie it to the right task.

The cumulative effect is a different way of running the project. When the builder proposes a change order, you don't have to estimate whether the budget can absorb it — you can see. When the kitchen quote comes in £1,800 over estimate, you can see in seconds where else you could trim to keep the bottom line intact. Decisions get quicker and more confident.