Your spreadsheet doesn’t know timber costs 30% more than when you built it.
It doesn’t know what happened to material prices in 2022. Or last quarter. Or last month. It just uses the numbers you typed in years ago — and quietly undercuts every quote you send out.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And you’re not careless. You’re just using a tool that was never designed to keep up with the way the building industry actually moves.
The Spreadsheet Problem Nobody Talks About
Most builders who price jobs digitally are using some version of the same thing: an Excel template they built themselves a few years back, or inherited from someone else, and have been running on ever since.
On the surface, it looks perfectly reasonable. The formulas work. The layout makes sense. You know where everything is. It even feels professional when you’re filling it in.
But here’s the fundamental problem with a spreadsheet: it’s a snapshot.
It captures how the world looked how much timber cost, what your labour rate was, what your overheads came to on the day you built it. And unless you’ve been diligently updating every single line every time anything changes in the market, it’s giving you numbers that belong to a different moment in time.
For a lot of builders, that moment was 2019. Or 2021. Or somewhere in the middle of a period when material costs moved more dramatically than at any point in recent memory.
What’s Actually Happened to Material Costs
Between 2020 and 2023, construction material prices across the UK rose significantly, in some categories by 30%, 40%, or more. Timber. Insulation. Plasterboard. Steel. Fixings. The increases were broad, sustained, and in many cases permanent.
Prices have stabilised somewhat since then, but they haven’t gone back. The baseline has shifted. And in 2026, with further cost increases forecast across the industry, the gap between “what your spreadsheet says” and “what things actually cost” is only likely to widen.
If your pricing template was built before any of that happened and you haven’t updated it rigorously since you are almost certainly underquoting. Not by a little. Potentially by a lot.
The Two Ways a Static Spreadsheet Costs You Money
There are really only two outcomes when you send a quote based on outdated material costs.
Outcome one: you win the job and lose money on it.
The quote looks competitive. The client is happy. The job starts. And somewhere around the second merchant delivery, you realise the numbers don’t add up the way they did on paper. You complete the job, you invoice, and the margin you thought you had quietly isn’t there.
Outcome two: you lose jobs you should be winning.
If you’ve instinctively been adding a buffer to compensate for uncertainty, pricing a little higher to protect yourself, you may be pricing yourself out of work that you should be competitive on. Clients choose someone else, and you never quite know why.
Either way, the root cause is the same: your pricing tool doesn’t reflect the current market, so every decision you make from it is based on incomplete information.
“But I Update It Regularly”
Some builders do. And if that’s genuinely the case if you’re reviewing your material costs monthly, updating your labour rates as they change, revisiting your overheads every quarter then you’re ahead of most.
But be honest with yourself about what “regularly” actually means. When did you last open the spreadsheet with the specific intention of updating the numbers, rather than just filling in a new job?
For most people, the honest answer is that the core numbers haven’t changed in a long time. New jobs get added. Old jobs get archived. But the underlying cost data the material rates, the labour costs, the overhead allocation — stays roughly where it was when the template was first built.
That’s not laziness. It’s just how spreadsheets work. They don’t prompt you to update them. They don’t flag when a material cost has drifted. They don’t know what happened in the market last month. They just calculate whatever you tell them to.
The Alternative: Pricing That Moves With the Market
ProntoCalc is built around a simple idea: your pricing tool should reflect what things actually cost today, not what they cost when you last checked.
Rather than relying on static numbers you entered manually and may or may not have updated, ProntoCalc keeps material costs current so when you sit down to price a job, the numbers you’re working from are the numbers that matter right now.
The result is faster quoting, more accurate margins, and the confidence to send a quote knowing it reflects the actual cost of doing the work.
No spreadsheet archaeology. No mental adjustment for “the prices have probably moved a bit.” Just a quote that’s right.
When Did You Last Actually Update Yours?
It’s worth sitting with that question for a moment. Not when did you last use the spreadsheet, when did you last update the underlying cost data it runs on?
If the answer is more than a few months ago, there’s a reasonable chance your last few quotes were based on numbers that no longer reflect reality. And in a market where material costs continue to move, that gap is only going to get wider.
ProntoCalc is free to try. If your current tool is working perfectly, you’ll know within the first job. If it isn’t, you might be surprised by how different accurate pricing feels.
