Desk 02 · 7 stories
Money & Contracts
Budgets, contracts, draws, allowances, and the paperwork that decides who pays for what.
Featured guide
A Working Framework for the Fit-Out Budget
Not a benchmark table: a thinking tool. The nine categories every hospitality fit-out budget needs, the planning ranges that keep them honest, and the two lines first-timers always forget.
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The complete desk
All Money & Contracts guides
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Budget Desk
Deposits and Draw Schedules: Where the Money Actually Goes Out
A fit-out budget tells you what things cost. It does not tell you when the cash leaves, and the when is what sinks first-timers. A plain-language guide to deposits, progress draws, retainage, and lien waivers.
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Budget Desk
Contingency Is a Plan, Not a Cushion
Every fit-out budget carries a contingency line, and almost every first-time owner treats it as padding to be quietly spent. A Budget Desk argument for treating contingency as a managed reserve with rules: sizing, drawdown discipline, and the difference between risk money and wish money.
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Field Notes
Who Insures the Half-Finished Room?
Between demolition day and opening night, your project is a pile of value that standard policies were not written for. Field notes on builder's risk, liability layers, certificates worth reading, and the FF&E sitting in a warehouse that nobody remembered to insure.
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Budget Desk
Cost per Key, Cost per Seat: Handle With Care
The hospitality industry compresses whole build-outs into one number: cost per key for hotels, cost per seat for restaurants. Useful shorthand, dangerous arithmetic. A Budget Desk piece on what the ratios genuinely tell you and the five ways they lie.
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Budget Desk
Fixed Price, Cost-Plus, GMP: What the Contract Decides Before Work Starts
Before a wall moves, the construction contract has already decided who carries price risk, who profits from surprises, and what your monthly money meetings will feel like. A plain-language tour of the three contract structures a hospitality owner will actually be offered.
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Budget Desk
The Change-Order Economy
Change orders are where fit-out budgets actually die: not in the bid, but in the drip of mid-project paperwork that reprices the job one signature at a time. How the change-order economy works, why it prices the way it does, and how owners keep it honest.
