The Spreadsheet Habit is Costing UK and Irish Construction Teams More Than They Realise
Project Management
Digital Transformation
The Spreadsheet Habit is Costing UK and Irish Construction Teams More Than They Realise
Construction accounts for 7% of UK GDP. In Ireland, the sector is valued at roughly €35 billion and is backed by a €165 billion National Development Plan running through to 2030. These are not small numbers. Which makes it all the more striking that both industries are still, largely, running their projects on Excel.
That's not an exaggeration. Eighty-five per cent of construction firms still use spreadsheets to track finances and build estimates. In 2025. With everything we know about how that plays out.
UK construction projects overrun their budgets by 13.9% on average. Building errors alone — not all rework, just errors — consume 11% of total project value across UK and EU construction. A 2023 PlanRadar study surveying over 2,500 professionals found that poor communication between teams was the number one cause of remedial work, and the UK had the highest rate of quality issues of any European country surveyed, at 40%.
None of that is inevitable. Most of it is preventable with better systems.
What "poor communication" actually means
When a PlanRadar study says poor communication causes rework, it's easy to read that as a people problem. It usually isn't. It's a data problem. When five people are working from five different versions of the same document — each saved to a different folder, each slightly out of date — miscommunication isn't a failure of professionalism. It's a predictable outcome of a broken workflow.
Spreadsheets create that situation by design. They're static. They don't update when someone on site changes a figure. They don't flag when two people have edited the same cell in separate versions. They don't alert you when spend is drifting past budget. By the time anyone notices something's wrong, it's already wrong enough to require remedial work.
Thirty per cent of all construction work ends up as rework. That's not a UK-specific figure, but the UK quality data suggests the sector here is particularly exposed. If 11% of your project value is being consumed by errors, and poor communication is the leading cause of those errors, then any tool that improves visibility and version control has a direct line to your margins.
Ireland's moment
Ireland is at an interesting inflection point. The government's BIM mandate came into force in January 2024, requiring Building Information Modelling on public sector projects above €100 million — with requirements cascading down to smaller projects over the next four years. That's a signal worth taking seriously.
The Build Digital annual survey shows that 81% of Irish construction organisations have started their digital transformation journeys. But "started" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Only around 19% have fully adopted digital tools. The remaining organisations are somewhere on a spectrum between paper processes and half-implemented software — and that gap has a cost.
The 2024 RICS Digitalisation in Construction report found that the UK and Ireland have the lowest levels of data and information exchange in construction globally. Not in Europe. Globally. That's a competitive disadvantage that only gets more pronounced as other markets close the gap.
The numbers that should be on every board agenda
Ninety-two per cent of UK government IT projects exceed their original estimates. Manufacturing automation projects overrun by 23% on average. And yet project management software is used by only 23% of businesses across the sector.
The connection is not subtle.
When you look at projects that do use dedicated PM tools, the success rate shifts to 73.8% meeting their original objectives. For context, only 31% of projects industry-wide are delivered within 10% of their original budget. That gap — between where you are and where you could be — is not closed by hiring better project managers or demanding tighter reporting. It's closed by giving your teams better systems.
McKinsey's research found that digital tools can reduce project costs by up to 6% and improve productivity by up to 15%. On a £5 million project, 6% is £300,000. Across a portfolio, it's the kind of margin improvement that changes what growth looks like for a business.
The practical reality
The firms that are going to struggle in the next five years aren't the ones that lack talent or ambition. They're the ones that keep asking talented, ambitious people to work with tools that make it harder to succeed than it needs to be. A site manager who spends 35% of their working week chasing information, resolving conflicts caused by version mismatches, and correcting data entry errors isn't underperforming. They're under-equipped.
KANNA gives your teams a single source of truth: real-time visibility across sites, structured data that doesn't break when two people open it at once, and the audit trail that compliance increasingly demands. The shift isn't complicated. The cost of not shifting is.
Sources
PlanRadar — The True Cost of Rework in UK and EU Construction (2023)
LetsBuild — Why It's Time for Construction to Quit Excel (2020)
Build Digital — Digitalisation in Irish Construction Annual Survey (2024)
Irish Construction Magazine — Growth, Innovation and Sustainability (2025)
McKinsey Global Institute — Reinventing Construction Through a Productivity Revolution
Autodesk & FMI — Hidden Costs of Poor Data Management in Construction
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