Marginly
Docs/Project Management/Budget & Spend

Budget & Spend

Tracking project costs and invoices in Marginly — setting budgets, logging invoices, and monitoring variances.

Overview

The Budget & Spend module is your financial control centre for a live development project. It connects your initial appraisal budget to the actual costs as they come in, giving you a real-time view of where you are against budget at every stage of the project.

Budget categories

Marginly organises your budget into the same four categories as the deal appraisal:

  • Acquisition: Purchase price, SDLT, legal fees
  • Build: Main contract, sub-contractors, materials
  • Professional Fees: Architect, structural engineer, QS, building control
  • Finance: Interest, arrangement fee, exit fee
  • Selling Costs: Estate agent, sales legal, marketing
  • Other: Catch-all for miscellaneous costs

You can add custom sub-categories within each group. For example, within "Build" you might add separate line items for groundworks, main contract, plumbing, electrical, and kitchen/bathrooms.

Importing from the appraisal

When you first set up the Budget & Spend for a project, you can import the totals directly from your deal appraisal as your budget baseline. This sets the initial budget for each category based on what you modelled when you decided to buy the deal.

Logging invoices

For each invoice you receive:

  1. Click "Add Invoice" in the relevant budget category
  2. Enter the date, payee, description, and amount
  3. Select the payment status: Paid, Outstanding, or Overdue
  4. Optional: attach a scan or photo of the invoice

Marginly shows the running total spent in each category and the remaining budget. Any category where actuals exceed budget is highlighted in red.

CIS tracking

For invoices from subcontractors covered by the Construction Industry Scheme, you can log the CIS deduction amount separately. Marginly shows the gross invoice, the CIS deduction, and the net payment — matching the format of your monthly CIS return to HMRC.

Budget variance report

The variance summary at the top of the Budget & Spend screen shows total budget, total spent, total committed (outstanding invoices), and remaining budget for the whole project. Use the category-level breakdown to identify problem areas before they become a crisis.