About Managing Budget

Project Budget Management is an important part of project planning and execution. Managing a budget refers to managing project estimates, costs and revenues.

Project Budget Management includes the processes involved in planning/estimating costs and controlling costs so that the project can be completed within the approved budget.

Project Budget Management is primarily concerned with the cost of resources needed to complete scheduled tasks, calculated from resource hourly rates and required effort. However, Project Budget Management should also take into account the impact of project activities that have fixed cost, such as services activities, maintenance activities, various decision meetings maintained during the project, etc.

Project cost and project revenue are calculated using different types of resource rates: Cost and Billing rates, correspondingly.

Initial Setup

Before you start a setup for budget management you need to check that:

• Enable Budget in the Module Activation category of Settings>System Settings is checked.
• You have Financial permissions.

To start managing Project Budget Financial user has to make initial financial settings at the Organization level:

• Organization Currency
• Organization Cost and Billing Rates
• Job Titles and their rates
• User Hourly Rates

Note:

To use budget management based on cost of resources the “Auto calculate budget using progress and resource rates” setting in the Budget category of your System Settings should be set to True.

Only a user with ‘Financial Permissions’ can view and adjust relevant budget information.

Planning and Controlling Budget

A Financial user can plan a budget based on initial cost and revenue estimates and track budget investment and profitability comparing between planned estimates and actual.

Following views can help users control financial status of a project during its execution:

• Budget view – presents % already invested in the work item, Budgeted Cost, and Actual and Fixed costs of the work items
• Revenue view – presents % already invested in the work item,  Expected Revenue and Actual Revenue and Fixed Price of the work items
• Extended budget view – summarizes all financial data presented in the Budget and Revenue views as well as presents profitability of the work item based on the comparison of the Actual Cost and Actual Revenue
• Properties card - contains all financial data of the specific work item

You can learn more about work item financial data in the section Work Item Financial Data.

The system triggers alerts to relevant people in budget conflict situations. 

Note:

Please, note that in the organization that works with multiple currencies support, values of rates can be accompanied by the corresponding currency code in case it differs from the organization currency (see Monetary Field section for details).

Managing Budget in Customer Projects

Time Tracking module and capability to manage billing rates and prices allow Clarizen users to manage various kinds of projects performed for specific Customer(s): service projects, build-to-order projects, build-to-customer and others. In order to take into account specifics rates and prices offered by the company to a specific customer, the Financial user can setup project-specific billing rates and prices.

Budget Related Alerts

Budget related alerts are triggered in the following situations:

• The Actual Cost exceeds the Budgeted Cost
• The manually-set Budgeted Cost is less than the Budgeted Cost calculated from the aggregated costs of the sub work-items.
• The manually set Actual Cost is less than the Actual Cost calculated from the aggregated costs of the sub work-items.

Setting up Project Specific Rates

In general, project price is calculated using Billing Hourly Rates defined at the Organization and User levels.

In addition Clarizen allows a Financial user to setup and manage project specific billing rates and prices, used for calculations of the project prices based on the time tracking reports.