Free template
The finishes schedule your builder stops ringing you about
Every designer has taken that call. Someone's on site, the tiler starts tomorrow, and the question is some version of “which one's going in the ensuite?” The answer exists — it's in a saved quote, a Pinterest board, an email thread from March, and your head. Which means it doesn't exist.
A finishes schedule is how the answer gets out of your head and onto one document: every surface in every room, coded, specified, and issued — so the person holding the trowel and the client approving the spend are looking at the same sheet you are.
Plenty of templates for this are sold on Etsy for the price of a nice candle. Ours is free, and it’s built the way schedules are issued on real jobs — reference codes, a revision register, and an FF&E schedule alongside it. New to the format? What a finishes schedule is (and how to build one) walks through it.
What’s inside
Four tabs, structured like a document you’d issue — not a list you’d lose:
1. Schedule info & revisions
Project details plus a proper revision register: Rev A, Rev B, date, issued to, what changed. The unglamorous table that settles every “but that's not the version I have” argument.
2. Finishes schedule
Room-by-room surfaces — walls, floors, ceilings, joinery, splashbacks, hardware — each line carrying a reference code (FL-01, WA-02), product, manufacturer, supplier, product code, finish/colour, size, quantity, who supplies it, and status.
3. FF&E schedule
The loose items — furniture, lighting, rugs, mirrors, window treatments — same code discipline (FF-01, LT-02), with dimensions and supplier detail. Finishes and FF&E are different documents that live on the same job; you get both.
4. How to use
A one-page quickstart including the reference-code legend, so codes on the schedule match codes on your drawings.
Both formats — Google Sheets and Excel — identical structure, dropdowns and status formatting included, print-ready at A4 landscape.
Get the template
Free — we’ll send both formats and a short guide to using it. Works in Excel, Google Sheets, and Numbers.
Why we’re giving it away
Honestly useful on its own — until it strains
Mortar is project and budget management for interior designers. The room-by-room item lists at the centre of Mortar are, structurally, a finishes schedule — with the parts a spreadsheet can’t do: client approvals on each item, trade pricing your client never sees, and a live status instead of a saved-as-final-v3 file.
So the template is free, and honestly useful on its own. When it starts to strain — three concurrent projects, a client who wants to approve selections without seeing supplier names, a revision you issued from the wrong file — you’ll already know what we make. A few emails on running specifications well, then we leave you alone. If budgets are the half you wrestle with, the budget template is this document’s other half.
FAQ
- What’s the difference between a finishes schedule and an FF&E schedule?
- Finishes are the surfaces that get built in — flooring, wall treatments, tiles, joinery, hardware. FF&E is what gets placed in the room afterwards — furniture, fixtures, equipment. Contractors price and build from the finishes schedule; procurement runs off the FF&E schedule. This template includes both as separate tabs because that’s how they’re used.
- What are the reference codes for?
- Cross-referencing to drawings. “FL-01” on the schedule and “FL-01” on the floor plan means nobody has to guess which oak goes where. The template ships with a standard prefix legend (FL floors, WA walls, CL ceilings, JN joinery, HW hardware, FF furniture, LT lighting…) — change it to match your studio’s convention.
- Should the schedule show prices?
- Generally no — a finishes schedule is a specification document, not a budget, and it’s often handed to contractors and clients. Money lives in your budget. (If you need a client-ready budget, that template is here.)
- Excel or Google Sheets?
- Both included, identical. Sheets is easier to keep current with an assistant or on site from a phone; Excel is better offline. If more than one person touches it, use Sheets — a finishes schedule with two divergent copies is worse than none.
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