Features
The budget, as easy to read as the mood board
Spreadsheets are where design budgets go to drift. Mortar makes the budget visual — progress bars, colour-coded status, totals that update as the project moves — so you and your client are always looking at the same number.
The drift problem
Every designer knows the shape of it. The budget lives in a spreadsheet. The selections live somewhere else. Between meetings, the two quietly disagree — a substitution here, a shipping cost there — and nobody notices until reconciling them becomes an evening's work. The spreadsheet isn't wrong because you're careless; it's wrong because keeping it right is a manual job that competes with actual design work.
Mortar closes the gap by making the budget live where the selections live. Add an item, swap an option, change a status — the room and project totals recompute on the spot. There is no separate ledger to keep in sync, because the budget is the project.
See trouble before it's trouble
Every room and project in Mortar carries a simple, colour-coded state: on track, approaching the limit, or over. The "approaching" warning fires as you close in on a budget's ceiling — before the overrun, while there's still room to swap the pendant lights rather than apologise for them.
No formulas to write, no conditional formatting to maintain. The signal is built in, and it's the same signal at every level: glance at a project and know which rooms need attention; open a room and see exactly where it stands.
A budget your client watches with you
The budget view carries through to your client portal: progress bars and live totals, updating in real time as selections change and decisions land. When your client can see where things stand between meetings, the money conversation happens early and calmly — not at install, and not loudly.
Budget conversations go bad in the gap between what the client remembers and what the spreadsheet says. Remove the gap and you remove most of the conversation.
Built for design budgets, not general ledgers
Mortar tracks budgets the way designers spend them — by room, by item, with the price attached to the actual product you've selected. It's not accounting software, and it doesn't try to be: it runs alongside your books, keeping the project side accurate so the accounting side has something true to work from.
Pricing is $59 per user, per month, published in full on our pricing page. Load a real project into the trial — you'll know within a week whether it matches how you work.
Ready to feel like a designer again?
Join the interior designers who stopped drowning in spreadsheets and started creating the client experiences their work deserves.
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