August 2026
Most surveyors know what they charge for a defect inspection. Far fewer know what it costs them to produce the report afterwards.
That is not carelessness. The inspection is a discrete, visible thing: you attend, you spend two hours on site, you invoice. The write-up is diffuse. It happens in the evening, in fragments, between other jobs, and it never appears on a timesheet because nobody is billing it separately.
Which means it is easy to price an instruction on the site time and quietly absorb the rest.
This is a method for working out your own number. It uses your figures, not mine, because fee levels and workloads vary enormously between practices and any average I gave you would be wrong for most readers.
Your time. The largest cost by a distance, and the one nobody measures. It covers writing descriptions, drafting probable cause and repair recommendations, sorting and captioning photographs, building the schedule of works, formatting the document, and checking it before it goes out.
Your tools. Software subscriptions, templates, whatever you use to produce the document. Usually small compared to the time cost, which is why it gets more attention than it deserves.
Rework and risk. The report that comes back with questions because the description was ambiguous. The schedule that a contractor prices wrongly because an item was unclear. The occasional instruction where a formatting error means reissuing. Hard to quantify, real all the same.
Do this properly once and you will know your number for good.
Step one: time your next three write-ups honestly. Not an estimate. Start a timer when you sit down and stop it when the document is issued. Include the interruptions and the returns to it, because those are real. Most people find the number is higher than they expected, which is the point of measuring rather than guessing.
Step two: work out your effective hourly cost. If you are a sole practitioner, take your target annual income plus overheads, and divide by the hours you actually expect to bill in a year. Not the hours you work: the hours you can invoice. That number is usually lower than people assume, because it has to absorb marketing, admin, holidays and the write-ups themselves.
If you are employed or you have a published charge-out rate, use that instead. It is a fair proxy for the value of an hour of your time.
Step three: multiply. Write-up hours times hourly cost, per instruction.
Step four: annualise. Multiply by the number of defect instructions you handle a year.
That final figure is what report production costs your practice. For most people doing this for the first time, it is the annualised number that lands rather than the per-instruction one. A modest amount of time per report becomes a substantial figure across a year's work.
Three things, none of them about software.
Whether your fees cover the work. If your fee is set on inspection time and the write-up is half again on top, you are working at a lower effective rate than you think. That is a pricing question before it is anything else.
Where the time actually goes. Most people assume it is the technical content, the diagnosis and the repair specification. When they time it, a surprising share turns out to be formatting, photograph handling and rebuilding the same document structure from the last job. That distinction matters, because the technical content is what you are paid for and the rest is not.
Whether it is worth changing anything. If you produce two defect reports a month, the total is probably not worth restructuring your workflow over. If you produce fifteen, it is a different conversation.
Being straightforward about our own pricing, since this is an article about cost.
BuildStack is £39 a month for up to five active projects, and £69 a month for unlimited. There is a free tier that gives you one project and one free export of each document type, which exists so you can produce a real report before deciding anything.
Wider market pricing is harder to state usefully. Some defect and inspection tools publish their prices; many quote on application, particularly those aimed at larger practices, and prices for those vary with seat counts and contract length. If you are comparing, ask for the total annual cost including any setup or per-user charges, because monthly headline figures do not always tell you what you will actually pay.
The general shape of the market is that on-site capture tools aimed at contractors and larger practices sit well above this range, and that most of them are built around recording defects during the inspection rather than producing documents afterwards. Whether that suits you depends on how you actually work.
Worth saying plainly, because the honest answer is not always the one that sells something.
If your volume is low, do nothing. Two or three defect reports a month does not justify a subscription or the effort of changing how you work. Your existing template is fine.
If the time is going on the technical content, software will not help much. If your write-up is slow because the diagnosis is genuinely difficult, that is expertise being applied and it is the part of the job you are paid for. No tool shortens it, and you would not want one that did.
If your template already works, keep it. Plenty of surveyors have a Word template refined over years that produces exactly what their clients expect. If the only friction is that you type into it, the gain from changing is small.
The case for changing anything is strongest where the time is going on the mechanical parts: rebuilding structure, moving photographs between folders, re-captioning, reformatting, retyping the same repair specification you have written fifty times. That is work that produces nothing a client values, and it is the part worth attacking.
The reason this matters is not really about efficiency.
It is that report production time is almost always unbilled, which means it comes out of your evenings rather than your fees. A surveyor who produces fifteen reports a year at an hour of write-up each is losing a couple of working days. At forty reports and three hours each, it is several weeks.
Whether you fix that by raising fees, changing your process, buying something, or deciding it is fine as it is, the useful first step is knowing the number.
Most people have never worked it out.
BuildStack is back-at-desk software for UK building surveyors, turning defect logs and site photographs into inspection reports, schedules of works and priced schedules. Built by a chartered member of the CIOB working in building surveying.