Features
The budget that moves when the selections do.
Every room has its own budget and shows how much of it is spent, so you catch the drift before the client does.
A live budget for every room · 0:43
Add, swap or get an item approved and the room total updates straight away, amber before it turns red. Your client sees the same number. Your margin stays yours.
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.
See it in action
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How Mortar compares
Free template
Not ready for a trial? Take the budget template.
Per-room budgets with live totals, a client-safe view with no trade pricing or margin, and traffic lights that turn amber before they turn red. Excel and Google Sheets, free.
Want the full story first? See what’s inside the free budget template.
Run your next project on one list. Get your evenings back.
Load a real project into the trial. Paste a product link and watch it fill itself in, then open the portal your client would see. You'll know within a week.
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