The inspection report lands, and it can run sixty pages. Somewhere in it are a few things that should change the price of the house and a great many that should not — and the report will not tell you which is which. That is not what a report is for.
So buyers tend to do one of two things. They forward the whole document and ask the seller to “address the findings,” which reads as a demand for everything and is usually answered with nothing. Or they pick items by gut at eleven at night, ask for too much or too little, and never find out which.
This workbook does the part in between.
How a finding gets priced
Log the finding, pick the closest match from the built-in Repair Cost Library, and the row prices itself: a wide low / typical / high planning band, scaled to your market by a regional cost index you can type over, plus the item’s hazard class and whether it is the kind of thing a lender or an insurer may want fixed before closing.
The library holds 126 curated repair items across 12 home systems, each with its band, one of 7 hazard classes, a general who-usually-pays norm you can override, and a note — and 20 items flagged as the kind of thing a lender or an insurer may want fixed before closing. If you already have a contractor’s written quote for something, type it into the Your quote column and it overrides the band for that row — everything downstream recalculates around it.
A rule instead of a hunch
Every logged finding is then sorted into one of four tiers — Deal-breaker, Major cost, Negotiable, or Cosmetic — by a rule that reads the hazard class, the financing flag, and two dollar thresholds you set on Setup. Deal-breaker is reserved for a safety, structural, water-intrusion or lender-flagged finding costing more than your cosmetic threshold, so a $350 handrail is never filed beside a $12,000 foundation job.
Each finding also gets a leverage score from 0 to 20, built from the hazard class, the estimated cost, the inspector’s own severity word, and whether the item touches financing or insurability. That ranking is what the rest of the file works from.
What the ask actually leaves you
The Ask tab does not just total your request. It nets it against the cash you can actually bring, your cash to close, and your lender’s seller-credit cap — and then against the version where the seller agrees to nothing and you still own every repair. The contingency deadline counts down beside it, worked from the real date on your contract rather than a typed reminder.
The part nobody else builds
It also lists what you are choosing not to ask for. Over-asking is one way a buyer can spend down a seller’s goodwill, so the absorbed findings are named, ranked and totaled rather than quietly dropped, each with its tier and hazard class. The file will not tell you to ask for less. It prices the choice so you can make it on purpose.
Credit at closing, or a repair before it
For your twelve shortlisted findings, both routes are priced side by side. A credit spends your lender’s cap down in rank order until it runs out; a seller-arranged repair is discounted by hazard class, from an editable per-class dial on the Repair Cost Library tab. The dial ships on the assumption that a rushed structural fix is closed up behind finishes before you can test it, and that a permit pulled and closed in the seller’s name can be worth more to you than the cash — change either number if you see it differently. Every row gets a recommended route and a dollar difference.
And then it becomes a document
The Request Builder assembles the shortlist into an actual repair-or-credit request: a header, an opening, one line per finding with its figure, and a total. Every figure taken from a library band rather than a contractor’s quote is marked as a planning estimate, and the lead line above the list counts them. Copy it between the two markers, or take the whole letter out of a single cell.
Try the free version first
If you want the triage frame before you buy, the free Inspection-Findings Triage Sheet is an ungated download — no email, no signup. Log a finding, take your own call on its hazard class, and a rule sorts it into deal-breaker, negotiable, or cosmetic; it opens on the same fictional inspection this worksheet does. What it does not do is price anything. Pricing each finding the moment you name it, netting the ask against the cash you have left, and turning the shortlist into a document you can send are what the paid worksheet is for.
Own it, don’t rent it
Buy it once and it is yours. No seats, no monthly fee, and no account to keep. Fill it in for this house, keep it with the contract as the record of what you asked for and why, and use it again on the next one. It works in Excel, in Google Sheets — via a one-click Make a copy link to a native Sheet, not an import — and in LibreOffice Calc.
The fine print, honestly
This is a decision-making and planning worksheet. It is not contractor, legal, or real-estate advice, it does not replace a licensed home inspector’s report or a licensed contractor’s estimate, it does not tell you what your contract entitles you to ask for, and it does not predict what a seller will agree to. Your contract governs what you can ask for and by when; your agent — and where it matters your attorney — are the people to ask about that.
Every cost figure in the library is a wide planning band, not a quote: assembled editorially by Ardent Workshop from publicly published home-repair cost guides, deliberately rounded outward, and scaled by a rough regional index you can overwrite. Local prices vary enormously. Ardent Workshop is not affiliated with or endorsed by any inspector, lender, insurer, brokerage, or contractor. The worked example the file opens on — the property, the inspection company and all 23 of its findings — is entirely fictional.
