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Manage Project Budgets

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You can set up a budget for each project. The budget is used to plan the resources that you allocate to a project. The budget can be either general with few entries or it can contain more entries that are divided into activity levels. You can then compare the budgeted amounts with the actual usage as recorded in the project journal. By monitoring differences between actual usage and budgeted usage, you can control an ongoing project and improve the quality of future projects by reducing the risk of underestimating costs.

The following procedure describes how to estimate budgeted costs during planning. For information about recording budgeted versus actual project prices and costs, see Record Usage for Projects.

To estimate the budgeted costs for a project

When a customer wants to know the price of a project that will be invoiced based on usage, you must determine the budgeted costs for the project. Use the Project Task Lines page to do that.

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Projects, and then choose the related link.
  2. Open a relevant project.
  3. Select a task line of type Posting, and then choose the Project Planning Lines action.
  4. On a new line, fill in the fields as necessary. Hover over a field to read a short description.

For the Line Type field, refer to the following information.

Line Type Description
Both Budget and Billable The cost and price amounts entered on the planning line are the budgeted costs for the particular planning line. The price amount will be invoiced.
Budget The customer is not charged for usage. Usage isn't transferred to an invoice, but is used to calculate WIP.
Billable The customer is charged for usage. Usage is transferred to the invoice, based on the quantity specified in the Qty. to Transfer to Invoice field.

Note

The Planned Delivery Date field for the planning line contains the date when usage related to the planning line is expected to be completed. It is also the date when the planning line may be transferred to a sales invoice and posted.

On the underlying project task on the Project Card page, the Start Date and End Date fields respectively contain the value of the Planned Delivery Date field on the earliest and latest project planning lines in the related Project Planning Lines page.

Note

When you fill in the Quantity field, all total price and total cost information will be calculated and filled in for that planning line. You can edit them at any time.

On the Project Card page, you can now see a summary of the total budgeted costs, budgeted price, billable cost and billable price for each task.

For information about recording budgeted versus actual project prices and costs, see Record Usage for Projects.

See also

Project Management
Finance
Purchasing
Sales
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