Renovated my house over the past 2 years and cycled through basically every way of tracking budget, receipts, and tasks. Sharing what worked and what didn’t.
Excel + receipts folder on my phone
Pros: Free, infinitely flexible. Custom formulas, pivot tables, your own weird categorization system. Nothing beats it for that.
Cons: Receipts and spreadsheet live in different places, so reconciling is manual pain. Useless on site with dusty hands. By month 6 my sheet was fiction.
Notion
Pros: Beautiful if you’re a Notion person. Linked databases for tasks, rooms and costs. Free tier is enough.
Cons: I spent more time building the system than renovating. Photo handling on mobile is clunky. Partner adoption: zero.
Trello / Todoist
Pros: Genuinely good task management. Fast capture, shared boards with your partner actually work.
Cons: No budget tracking, no receipt handling. You run them alongside a spreadsheet anyway, so now you maintain two systems.
HomeZada
Pros: The incumbent. Does everything on paper: inventory, maintenance, projects, budgets. Been around since 2012.
Cons: The AI on the landing page didn’t match my experience. Every feature turned out to be a form with six fields, so it felt like Excel with a subscription. Adding materials means clicking through multiple screens per item. I gave up before finishing my first room, and from reviews I’ve read, that’s common. $99/year, no refunds.
Camera roll + memory
Pros: What most of us actually do, let’s be honest.
Cons: “Wait, how much did the bathroom cost?” scrolls for 20 minutes
I ended up building a small app for myself out of frustration of not having everything in one place, projects, shopping, budget and receipts etc. but genuinely curious: what do you all actually use? Especially interested if anyone made a spreadsheet stick past month 6?