Property Development
Budget Tracking and AI Cost Prediction for a Property Developer
A property developer kept his build budget in a spreadsheet, separate from his builder's. Invoices were a black box. We replaced it with a Build Budget app that holds one shared budget, links every invoice to a line, and tracks product selections. AI cost prediction is scoped on top of it.
Client
A property developer in regional Australia running two to three new builds a year with an external builder, a site manager, a project manager and a virtual assistant. No in-house software team. Anonymized, active engagement.
Stack
The problem
The budget lived in a spreadsheet that never updated itself and could not forecast. Worse, there were two of them: the developer kept one and the builder kept another, so nothing reconciled and every conversation about money started from scratch. Builder invoices arrived with no link back to a budget line, which made them impossible to check quickly. Small costs like bin fees slipped through entirely. Project communication was scattered across texts, emails and calls, and a separate product selection tool went unused by the site team precisely because it was separate.
What we built
The first attempt was an Airtable budget tracker with rate-based and quote-based lines, actuals, variance and remaining, seeded from a live project. It was too complex for the team, so it was simplified and then replaced by a custom Build Budget app that holds the developer's budget and the builder's budget as one. Each invoice links to the budget item it belongs to, with an amount-paid field and document upload. A product catalog sits inside the same app, with a name, photo, supplier, price and a status of proposed, approved or ordered, plus a designer role that gets a weekly email of pending approvals. Alongside it, a WhatsApp bot on the project group turns the chat the team already uses into a structured daily log, an archive of every photo and document that can be retrieved by name, a to-do list by reply, and a weekly hours prompt feeding a timesheet with CSV export.
What changed
The developer describes the result as complete transparency over the build, which he says has relieved a lot of the stress the two-budget arrangement caused. The builder worked out the app without a handover meeting. The WhatsApp bot mattered for an unglamorous reason: everyone was already on WhatsApp, so information gets dumped in and retrieved later by asking, instead of being chased. The AI cost prediction layer, a chat over historical invoices keyed on house size with a base rate per square metre plus per-room product costs, is scoped and not yet confirmed built, as is a sourcing tracker for overseas suppliers.
The takeaway
Two budgets is not a tooling problem, it is a trust problem wearing a tooling costume. The fix was not a better spreadsheet, it was one record that both sides write to and both sides can see. Everything after that, product approvals, invoice linking, the daily log, only worked because the shared record existed to hang it on.
“for me now, I have complete transparency ... it's relieved my stress a lot.”
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