Real-time Budget vs Actuals: How Curlew Capital Eliminated Excel and cut Reporting Time in Half

Curlew Capital’s development team spent hours each week compiling budget vs actuals reports in Excel. The numbers were outdated before the spreadsheet closed. Invoices sat in approval queues. Budget variances surfaced too late to act on.

After implementing Alasco’s real-time cost control platform, Curlew reduced budget reporting time by 45-50% and gained instant visibility into project spending.

What problem did Curlew Capital need to solve?

Curlew Capital, a UK-based firm specialising in Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA), manages investments across university towns in the UK and Netherlands. As the portfolio expanded, Excel-based budget tracking broke down.

“Excel required a lot of manual data entry and this could lead to mistakes,” says Greg Fox, Development Director. “It was also an accounting, rather than a development-specific model, which made sharing data between departments difficult.”

The development team faced a fundamental gap: no real-time visibility into how actual spending compared to budget. Every budget vs actuals report required manual compilation, and results were stale on arrival.

How did manual budget tracking affect operations?

The Excel workflow created cascading problems:

Delayed decision-making: Budget variances weren’t visible until manual reports were compiled which often made it too late to course correct and ate up the contingency budget.

Invoice bottlenecks: Paperwork wasn’t centralised, approvals happened by email or phone, causing approval delays and strained relationships with their contractors.

Data entry errors: Manual processes introduced mistakes into cost tracking, and since all records were kept in Excel, there was no way of tracking a certain error or flagging it early enough.

Department silos: As Greg explained, their Excel model was an accounting-view one, which didn’t serve the purpose of day to day project management.

What solution did Curlew implement?

Curlew deployed Alasco to automate invoice management and deliver real-time budget vs actuals tracking. The platform replaced manual data entry with digitised workflows.

Key capabilities of Alasco:

• Automated invoice intake, data extraction and configurable approval workflows
• Automated invoice-to-budget matching and real-time cash flow forecast
• Real-time actuals updates as invoices process
• Contractor and cash flow-level cost breakdowns
• Centralised document storage and access

“On top of being user-friendly, Alasco understands the work we do,” says Fox. “Once we were on board, the Alasco team spent a lot of time ensuring that the platform worked for us.”

What results did Curlew achieve?

45-50% time savings on producing cost reports and comparing actual to budget.

“We have saved a significant amount of time in the region of 45% to 50% in respect of producing cost reports and comparing actual to budget,” confirms Fox. “Alasco has also enabled us to improve the payment process.”

Beyond efficiency gains, real-time budget visibility transformed risk management.

“It has also fed into our risk committee reports,” adds Kirsten Damant, Investment Analyst. “We’re able to see how close we are to budget and how budgets are changing over time.”

Why does real-time budget vs actuals matter for developers?

Development projects live or die on cost control. When budget variance data lags by days or weeks, teams can’t course-correct. Margins bleed before anyone notices.

Real-time budget vs actuals tracking closes the feedback loop. Project managers see current spending against budget instantly—not in a report compiled last month.

For Curlew, this shift meant:

• Immediate visibility into budget health across all projects
• Faster invoice approvals with automated workflows
• Live data feeding risk committee reports
• Development-specific views replacing accounting templates

About Curlew Capital: Curlew Capital is a privately-owned, UK-based Investment and Development Management firm specializing in Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA), creating and managing investments for institutional investors.

Contributors

Gregory Fox

Development Director

Curlew Capital

Greg Fox is Development Director at Curlew Capital, where he has led development projects since 2020. He holds a BSc in Construction Management from the University of Reading and brings over a decade of industry experience spanning site management and development leadership. Before joining Curlew, Greg managed construction at One Blackfriars, one of London's landmark residential towers.

Kirsten Damant

Senior Investment Analyst

Curlew Capital

Kirsten Damant is Senior Investment Analyst at Curlew Capital. With a master's degree in Real Estate from Kingston University in London, she joined Curlew Capital in 2020 as Development Analyst.