Case study: the builder who got a day a week back
By Peter Springett · 1 September 2026
The challenge
For this Thanet based builder, every job started with the same spreadsheet. It had been in service for years, growing a bit at a time, and it showed: broken formulae, duplicate rows, figures that no longer added up.
Pricing a new project meant working through it by hand. Supplier estimates, architect plans, council PDFs and client briefs all had to be read and the numbers typed across. Room measurements were pulled out of documents one at a time. Roughly a day a week disappeared into every estimate.
The builder knew what would fix it. He wanted date-stamped incremental client payments tracked in the same place, so he could see what had been invoiced and what was still owed on every job. Setting that up properly would have taken days he did not have, so it kept getting pushed back. Meanwhile the pricing itself was never scrutinised. Nobody had the time to ask whether a £100,000 project could have been more efficiently priced.
The solution
We ran a two-hour session and pointed Claude Cowork at his own files. His spreadsheet, his clients, his jobs. Here are the key stages that led to success.
Seeing. We asked Cowork what it could make of the spreadsheet. It came back with the document, the business behind it (logo and address included) and a summary of 18 months of projects.
Optimising. We asked for a clean pricing template with the inaccuracies, broken formulae and duplication stripped out. It took three minutes.
Enhancing. The builder added the payment tracking he had been putting off. New rows, columns and formulae, done in a couple of minutes.
Populating. He dropped a recent client's files into the project folder: supplier estimates, architect plans, council PDFs, briefs. Cowork read the lot, including measurements buried in a PDF, and filled the template.
Checking. We compared the result against the version he had priced by hand. Where the two disagreed, we made Cowork explain its methodology. It was usually the more diligent of the two. A few minutes of back and forth closed the gap.
Then the question that mattered most: where can this job be run more cheaply?
The benefits
A day a week returned. Pricing that took a full day now runs from the files themselves.
A template that holds up. No broken formulae, no duplicates, and payment tracking that had been on the wishlist for months.
Better numbers, not just faster ones. On the discrepancies, the automated pricing was generally more accurate than the manual one.
5% off a £100,000 project. Cowork identified cost savings worth at least £5,000 on a single job.
More than £50,000 a year in potential margin. From two hours of training.
What made the difference
Most people use AI for one-off tasks. Draft this email, tidy that paragraph. It saves a few minutes and changes nothing.
The shift here was pointing AI at the assets the business already runs on, and letting it work with them. That is where the days come back.
Want AI running part of your business rather than chipping in occasionally? Get in touch with Bright Content.