FF&E budget template: how to set a budget for a UK interior project

Short answer: build your FF&E budget as a set of room allowances in pounds, all ex VAT, before you choose a single product. Add a VAT line at 20%, a delivery line and a contingency line, then show your client the inc VAT total. As you select products, put each one's ex VAT line total next to its room allowance. You'll see which rooms are over budget before your client does.

What an FF&E budget is, and how it differs from your schedule

Your FF&E schedule lists the products: what, where, how many, from whom and at what price. Your FF&E budget is the number you agreed with your client before any of that existed, broken down by room.

The two live side by side. The budget says the living room has £12,000. The schedule says the sofa, two lamps, a rug and a coffee table currently add up to £10,850. The gap between those figures is the conversation you need to have with your client, and it's much easier to have early.

If you only keep a schedule, you find out you're over budget when you total it up at the end. If you keep a budget too, you find out room by room while you can still swap a rug.

A column layout for your FF&E budget template

Give your budget sheet one row per room (or per area on a larger job) and these columns:

• Room
• Allowance ex VAT (£)
• Selected ex VAT (£), the sum of the product line totals for that room
• Difference (£), allowance minus selected
• Items still to choose
• Notes (what was agreed, what's flexible)

Under the rooms, add the lines that don't belong to any one room:

• Delivery and installation
• Contingency
• Subtotal ex VAT
• VAT at 20%
• Total inc VAT

Keep everything ex VAT until the bottom of the sheet. Add VAT once, as its own line. If you mix trade prices (usually quoted ex VAT) with retail prices (usually inc VAT) in the same column, your room totals stop meaning anything. Our UK VAT guide covers that layout in more detail.

Set room allowances before you choose products

Start from the total your client is comfortable with, inc VAT, because that's the figure they'll be thinking in if they're a homeowner. Work back to ex VAT by dividing by 1.2. A £60,000 inc VAT budget gives you £50,000 ex VAT to spread across the rooms, delivery and contingency.

Take the contingency off first. Then take off a delivery and installation allowance. What's left gets split across the rooms.

Weight the split towards the rooms that carry the big pieces. A living room with a sofa, armchairs and a large rug will eat more than a guest bedroom. Write the reasoning in the notes column ("main sofa is the priority", "reusing the client's dining chairs") so that when you move money between rooms later, you and your client can see why.

The costs that catch UK budgets out

Product prices are the easy part. Budgets drift on the lines around them.

VAT basis

One retail price entered as if it were trade adds 20% you didn't plan for. Check how each supplier shows prices and record it.

Delivery

Large furniture often ships with a separate delivery charge, and some suppliers charge more for a two-person or room-of-choice service. Keep these on the delivery line, not hidden inside the product price, so you can see the true cost.

Pieces from the EU

Since Brexit, goods shipped from the EU to the UK can carry import VAT and, depending on where they were made, customs duty. Some suppliers include these in the price and some leave them for the buyer. Ask before you count the piece, and keep anything priced in euros clearly marked so it isn't added to your pound totals by mistake.

Price changes

A price you saved during concept may not be the price at sign-off. Record the date you captured each price, and recheck the older ones before you share the budget with your client.

Contingency

Keep a contingency line from day one, and only spend it when something genuinely changes. If you start using it to cover a room that went over, it's no longer a contingency.

Track selected against allowance as you go

The budget only helps if the "selected" column stays up to date. Each time you shortlist a product for a room, add its line total (unit price times quantity, ex VAT) to that room's selected figure.

Total by room, not just by project. A project total that looks fine can hide a kitchen that's £3,000 over and a bedroom that's £3,000 under. Your client may be happy to move that money, but they'll want to be asked.

When you report back, show the difference column rather than just the totals. "The living room is £1,150 under, so we have room for the larger rug" is an easier conversation than two big numbers side by side.

Doing this in Aalto

Most of the typing in a budget goes into the product side, and that's the part Aalto does.

When you save a product from a supplier site with the Aalto Chrome extension, it captures the name, brand, price, image and supplier link, so you aren't retyping rows. You organise products by room inside a project, and every product you save sits in one library across all your projects. A sofa you used last year is one search away when you price up the next job.

For UK projects, set your workspace tax region to United Kingdom in Settings. Your project table then shows prices and line totals both ex and inc VAT, and the footer shows the subtotal ex VAT, the VAT and the total inc VAT. You can give a single item a custom rate, mark it zero-rated or exempt, or set a whole project as client exempt. Items priced in euros don't get UK VAT unless you give them a custom rate, and the footer totals each currency separately, so euro pieces don't quietly join your pound total. Tax works on both Free and Pro.

Aalto records the price when you save a product. It rechecks shortlisted and ordered products each week while you're working on the project, and you can refresh any product's price yourself before you send numbers to a client.

Aalto can hold one budget total on the collection for a project and sum the prices as you add pieces. It doesn't hold room allowances, so keep those on your budget sheet and fill the selected column from Aalto. Export your project to CSV on Free or Pro (the tax columns come with it), or to Excel on Pro. When it's time to present the selections, the PDF Lookbook on Pro lets you show prices ex VAT, inc VAT or both.

The Free plan covers 100 products and one collection, with no credit card needed. Start with one project on aalto.app.