COSTS: Build a Schedule and See What It Comes To
Fee earners with grades and rates, time in hours and minutes or in units of six, disbursements with their VAT treatment, and a summary that shows its own working. Totals by fee earner, by phase and by task; VAT at the rate you set; the total as a proportion of the claim; and the variance against a budget, phase by phase. Every calculation is done in whole pence, never in floating point pounds. It runs in this tab and nothing is uploaded.
1. The matter
2. Fee earners
A grade and an hourly rate each. The second rate is for the one phase where a different rate was agreed; leave it empty if there is not one.
3. Phases and the budget
The phases of a costs budget, as a starting list. Rename them, reorder them, delete the ones that do not apply, add your own. The budget figure is what was allowed for that phase, excluding VAT; leave it empty where there is no budget.
4. Time
No time recorded yet.
Import time from a CSV
Paste the file or choose it, say which column is which, look at the preview, then import. Nothing is sent anywhere; the file is read in this tab.
Which column is which
The first few lines, as they will be imported
5. Disbursements
No disbursements yet.
What it comes to
What this is, and what it is not
Money is counted in pence, and never in pounds. A pound held as a decimal number is not exact: add a tenth to two tenths in floating point and you do not get three tenths. Every figure on this page is an integer number of the smallest unit, and the only division is by sixty, for the hour, and by ten thousand, for the VAT rate. That is why the totals reconcile exactly rather than nearly.
The rounding rule, said once and applied everywhere. Each line of time is rounded to the nearest penny, half a penny rounding up, at the moment the line's own figure is worked out: rate in pence, times minutes, divided by sixty. Every total is then the sum of those rounded lines, so what is on the schedule is what the columns add to. VAT is rounded the same way, once, on the base rather than line by line. Rounding every line and then summing gives a different answer from summing and rounding once; this page does the first, and shows you the arithmetic so you can see which.
A unit is six minutes, and half a unit is three. You can type time either way. Whichever you choose it is held as a whole number of minutes, so one unit is exactly 0.1 of an hour, half a unit is exactly three minutes, and switching between the two forms does not shift a single figure. Six minutes at three hundred pounds an hour is three thousand pence, exactly.
What the budget comparison compares. Incurred against budget, phase by phase, excluding VAT, counting both profit costs and the disbursements you have put against that phase. Phases over their figure are flagged. The tool has no opinion about whether being over is a problem; it tells you it has happened and by how much.
Proportionality is a number here, not an answer. The page divides the costs by the value of the claim and shows the result as a percentage and as a ratio. Whether the costs are proportionate is a judgement about the case: what was at stake beyond money, how complex it was, how the other side behaved. A percentage is the start of that argument, not the end of it.
What it does not do, and what it never sees. It does not know your court's format, it does not produce a form, it does not give legal advice, and it does not check whether a rate is allowable. Nothing is uploaded. The matter you are working on is kept in this browser's own storage so it is still there when you come back; save it to a file if it matters, because clearing your browsing data clears that store too.
Questions people ask
Does anything leave my machine?
No. There is no account, no server and no upload. The page works offline, and the matter is held in this browser's local storage plus whatever file you save.
Why do my totals differ by a penny from another system?
Almost always rounding. Some systems round every line and add the rounded figures, which is what this page does and states; others add the exact figures and round once at the end. Over hundreds of lines the two drift apart by a few pence. Turn on the arithmetic column and you can see every step.
Can I use a VAT rate that is not twenty per cent?
Yes, any rate to two decimal places, including seventeen and a half. The rate is held as basis points, so 17.5 per cent is 1750 and the VAT is the base times 1750 divided by ten thousand, rounded half up.
What does the second rate do?
It covers the common case where a different hourly rate was agreed for one phase, usually the trial. Set the second rate and pick the phase it applies to; every line of that fee earner's time in that phase uses it, and everything else uses the first rate.
What can I import?
Any CSV with a header row. You say which column holds the date, the fee earner, the phase, the task, the activity, the description, the time and whether it is claimed, then look at the preview before anything is added. Fee earners and phases it has not seen before are created, with no rate, so you can see what came in.
Is the printed schedule a court form?
No. It is a clean printable document of the schedule and the totals, laid out for paper rather than for a screen. What form your court wants, and what has to be on it, is a question for the rules that apply to you.