Three Freebies and a Spreadsheet: Auditing the Favours You Handed Out This Year

There's a point in November, usually around the second week, when the diary goes quiet in a way that isn't restful. The Christmas rush hasn't landed, the invoices from October are still out, and the bank balance does that thing where it looks fine until you subtract the VAT. That's the week the favours you handed out in February start to feel expensive.

Nobody sets out to run a discount scheme. It just accumulates: the neighbour's gate, the customer of fifteen years who wanted a "quick look", the sister-in-law's thing that turned into two evenings. None of it gets invoiced, so none of it gets counted, and by December the business has quietly donated a fortnight of billable time to people who mostly could have paid.

This isn't a piece about being less decent. It's about knowing the number.

The favour never shows up where you can see it

Materials leave a trail. You've got the receipt from the trade counter, the mileage, the £60 of fixings. Hours don't leave a trail at all. They vanish into a Saturday and reappear as a vague sense that you've been busy but not productive.

The accounting is genuinely awkward too. As a sole trader or a small limited company, materials you buy for a free job are usually deductible as a business cost, but your time was never taxable in the first place — so there's no line, no loss recorded, no flag. The work simply happened and the money simply didn't. It's the only expense in the business that leaves no evidence except your own tiredness.

That's the gap a ledger fills. Not for HMRC. For you.

Three jobs, three real bills

One: the gate that ate a Saturday

A neighbour, decent bloke, asked if you could "just have a look" at a gate that had dropped. You said yes because he'd had your van off the drive once and because it was easier than saying no.

It was not a look. It was a post to reset, a hinge to replace, a second trip to the merchant because the first hinge was wrong, and a return visit a fortnight later when it sagged again. Call it six and a half hours across two weekends, £80 in materials, and forty minutes of driving.

At your normal rate that's a £520 job. The thing that actually hurt was the Saturday it displaced — a paid install you'd already turned down for the same weekend because you didn't want to be double-booked. That one was worth £480. So the favour cost you £80 in cash and somewhere north of £900 in opportunity.

Two: the fifteen-year customer's "sense check"

Long-standing clients are the hardest to price, because the relationship feels like it's already been paid for. This one asked for a quick opinion on a lease before signing. Fair enough. Except it turned into three phone calls, a redrafted paragraph, and a document you read at half nine on a Tuesday.

Four hours, no invoice, and a reasonable market price of £350. Worse, you've now taught a good customer that this particular service is free. The next request will arrive with the same framing and a slightly shorter lead time.

Three: the family job

The one that gets done at night, so it doesn't technically cost anything. Signage for a relative's salon — measured on a Sunday, made over two evenings, fitted on a Thursday before opening. Five hours, a favour within a favour, and a takeaway as payment.

No cash left the business. But five evening hours are five evening hours, and you spent them doing the thing you sell, for nothing, in the same week you were too tired to chase two overdue invoices.

Add it up across a quarter and it's roughly sixteen hours and about £1,300 of unpriced work, in a period where you also said no to two properly paid jobs because the diary looked full. That's the sentence worth sitting with.

The displaced-work question

The number isn't the hours. The number is what the hours would otherwise have earned. Every time a favour lands, ask one question: if this hadn't come in, what would I have done with that half-day?

If the honest answer is "nothing, I'd have watched the football", do the favour and enjoy it. If the answer is "invoiced someone", you've just found the price. That's not ruthless, it's just arithmetic — and it's the same arithmetic your accountant will do in January with a much less friendly face.

The one-page ledger

Keep it stupidly simple. A page in the back of the quote pad, a note on your phone, a tab in the same spreadsheet you use for expenses. Six columns:

• Date
• Who asked, and how you know them
• What they asked for versus what it became
• Hours actually spent (round up, honestly)
• Cash out of pocket — materials, parking, mileage
• What you'd have invoiced a stranger

Two rules keep it useful. Anything over ninety minutes gets a line, no exceptions, because the ninety-minute jobs are the ones that hide. And put a cap on it: two jobs a quarter, or a cash-equivalent ceiling of, say, £150 a month. When the cap's gone, the answer until January is a friendly no.

Review it on the first Monday of the month. Ten minutes. You're not doing it to feel bad — you're doing it so the January rate review has a real number behind it instead of a hunch.

Three scripts that don't sour anything

Most owners don't fear the work. They fear the awkwardness. So keep a few lines ready — the trick is having them before the request lands, not inventing them on the doorstep.

The price-it-properly pivot. "I can definitely sort that. My rate's £X an hour plus materials — want me to send a proper quote over?" Said warmly, this reads as professional rather than mercenary. Roughly half the time people say yes, because they were expecting to pay anyway.

The swap. "Happy to. What are we trading?" Works brilliantly with other trades and with anyone who has something you need — a morning of labour, a bit of bookkeeping, the loan of a trailer. A favour that runs both ways isn't a leak, it's a network.

The diary shield. "I'm rammed until the second week of December. If it can wait, I'll price it then — if it can't, try [name], he's good and he's quiet at the moment." You've been helpful, you've been honest, and you've handed the problem to someone who actually wants it.

What to do with it in December

Don't turn the ledger into a grievance. Turn it into a decision. If the page shows you've given away £1,200 of work this quarter, that's your answer to the question every owner asks in the quiet week before Christmas: where's the margin gone?

It went out the door one friendly yes at a time. Which means it can come back the same way — one priced quote at a time, starting with the next person who says "do us a favour".

Keep being the one who helps. Just keep the receipt.