Plan the cost before the job starts
Sixteen categories from site setup through handover, each split into labour, materials, subcontract and equipment. Add contingency and overhead, put the contract value at the top, and the sheet shows the margin the plan actually leaves you.
Excel / Google Sheets compatible · no sign-up required
Three steps to a working document
Split every category four ways
Labour, materials, subcontract and equipment per category. The split is what makes the budget useful later: a category over budget tells you nothing, but a category over on labour and fine on materials tells you exactly what happened.
Carry a real contingency
It is a line with a number, not a hope. A plan with no contingency is a plan that assumes nothing goes wrong on a construction site, which is not a plan.
Read the margin, then decide
Enter the contract value and the sheet computes planned gross profit and margin. If that number is thinner than you expected, this is the cheapest moment in the whole job to find out.
Planned margin is not earned margin. This is the plan; what the job actually did is budget-versus-actual, which is a different exercise and usually a different number. Overhead here is a percentage allocation, not your real business overhead — if you have never worked out what your overhead actually costs per month, the percentage in this sheet is a placeholder rather than an answer.
When the spreadsheet stops scaling
In BuildersBridge the accepted estimate becomes the job budget, and committed cost from purchase orders lands against it as you order — so the plan and the actual sit in the same view instead of two spreadsheets a month apart.
See how it works in BuildersBridgeCommon questions
How is a budget different from a job costing sheet?
A budget is the plan made before the work starts. Job costing is the comparison of what actually happened against that plan. You need both, and conflating them is how a job gets measured against a number that was quietly revised to match it.
What contingency should I carry?
It depends on how well the scope is defined and how much of the work is new to you. The template defaults to 5%, which is a common starting point for a well-defined residential job and too thin for a renovation with unknowns behind the walls.
Should overhead be in the job budget?
Some builders allocate it per job and some carry it only at the business level. The template includes it as an editable percentage so the planned margin reflects a full cost rather than a direct-cost-only number.
Can I add my own cost categories?
Yes. The sixteen are a residential starting point — insert rows and the totals follow. Keep the same categories across jobs, because the value of the split is comparison.