Are you putting together a budget or tracking actual costs or both? Is a contractor involved?

Hi there we have a contractor but we also want to track our expenses as we go. Are there specific Excel spreadsheets or best to make your own?

There are endless possibilities for tracking costs. Give me an example of what you are calling "expenses". Would it include, for instance, budget costs for individual plumbing fixtures or just the contractor's contract price broken into a payment schedule. Is it something you would use to help you track costs in the design phase or just during construction? Will the contract be lump sum or cost of the work plus a fee? Will there be an architect? Is no one else going to track costs?

Excel has all the functionality you need to track expenses, but how useful it will really be depends on how familiar/comfortable you are with it (i.e. formulas) or how willing you are to Google learn. For our custom build, I created a spreadsheet detailing all of the options we had discussed (e.g. adding a privacy fence, second fireplace), and then I added a filter to the data so that I could pick and choose which options to see, and how those made the price go up or down in the subtotal function. But if I was just tracking the data, and didn't need to manipulate it, then I wouldn't have needed more than a cursory familiarity with the AutoSum button in the Data ribbon.

I would like to track all expenses from permits, tree removals and design plans to construction fees . I wil take an excel workshop. Thanks all!

That's 4 expenses, maybe a dozen if you break the construction and design costs into individual payments. If you have children older than 14 they could format it and all you would have to do is enter the numbers. You could list the months across the top and put the payments in the appropriate month column. You could have a column for the totals paid and how much is left to be paid.

There are templates for Excel made for this purpose already.

https://templates.office.com/en-au/Home-construction-budget-TM00000068

The Excel "Home Construction Budget" template tracks the cost of the construction work for a small project by listing all of the materials and labor which is what a builder would need to know for a house renovation. The OP wants to keep track of an Owner's costs.

It might be posable to substitute contractor payments and other owner costs for the material and labor costs in the List of Expenses if you could figure out how to edit the "labor" and "materials" categories. I don't know how and I've been tracking projects in Excel since the first version that came with the first Mac.

You could use budgeting software that will import all your checking account and cc expenses which you could then categorize based on the breakouts you want to see. I like YNAB and it allows me to see how much everything was. But it isn’t free like excel there is a monthly or yearly fee.