One frustrated shop owner’s homemade tracking system for challenging his property revaluation has apparently become genuinely marketable in its own right
LEEDS Local shop owner Trevor Wainwright confirms the spreadsheet he built to track and appeal his business rates following the 2026 property revaluation has grown so genuinely sophisticated that he’s seriously considering “just selling the thing as standalone software to other small business owners going through the exact same nightmare.”
How This Spreadsheet Actually Started
A simple tracking document meant to organize his own appeal paperwork gradually expanded into a comprehensive system cross-referencing comparable property valuations, transitional relief calculations, and appeal deadline tracking across multiple categories.
What Made This Tracking System Genuinely Necessary
Wainwright’s shop, caught in the gap between losing partial small business rate relief and facing a substantial revaluation increase, required careful navigation of transitional relief caps that vary considerably by property size category.
How Sophisticated This System Has Actually Become
Detailed enough that a fellow shop owner, after seeing it during a casual conversation, reportedly asked whether Wainwright would consider building a version for her own appeal, a request that planted the genuine software idea.
Why He’s Actually Taking This Software Idea Seriously
The Federation of Small Businesses estimates hundreds of thousands of businesses could benefit from threshold changes and clearer navigation tools, suggesting genuine market demand for exactly the kind of system Wainwright accidentally built for himself.
What He’d Need To Do To Actually Turn This Into A Real Product
Considerable additional development work and genuine market research, steps he admits feel “honestly a bit daunting for someone who just wanted to sort out his own rates bill originally.”
Whether He’s Actually Moving Forward With This Idea
Cautiously exploring it, he confirms, treating his original frustration-born spreadsheet as potentially “the most useful accidental thing I’ve ever built, purely out of necessity.” Further UK small business coverage continues at bohiney.com.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com