The 11 departments every interior project should be tracked against

If you ask ten interior studios how they split a project budget, you will get ten different answers. Some split by room, some by trade, some by vendor. None of those scale.

We settled on an 11-department split because it maps cleanly to how vendors quote and how site engineers think about progress.

The 11 buckets

1. Civil Works — masonry, demolition, waterproofing
2. Carpentry & Joinery — wardrobes, beds, kitchen cabinetry
3. False Ceiling Works — POP, gypsum, cove lights
4. Electrical Works — wiring, switches, light fixtures
5. Plumbing Works — pipes, fittings, sanitaryware
6. Painting & Polishing — wall paint, PU polish, texture
7. Tiling & Flooring — tiles, marble, wooden flooring
8. HVAC / Air Conditioning — AC, copper piping, ducting
9. Glass & Glazing — shower partitions, mirrors, balcony
10. Modular Furniture / Upholstery — sofa, dining, beds, curtains
11. Miscellaneous — the catch-all for everything else

Why eleven, not seven or fifteen

Seven is too coarse — civil and carpentry are completely different vendors with different payment cycles, and lumping them loses the signal. Fifteen is too granular — your site engineer will not consistently tag a ₹400 hinge to "Hardware — wardrobe — soft-close".

Eleven hits the sweet spot: every department maps to either a single vendor or a tight cluster, and the buckets are unambiguous enough that two different site engineers will tag the same expense the same way.

One rule

Resist the urge to create project-specific departments. "Smart home — Mr. Mehta villa" feels useful when you are building the budget, but it makes cross-project analytics impossible. Tag it to Electrical and use the description field for the detail.