Project Budget Tab

This tab is reached by opening a project from the Project Browser and selecting the Budget subtab. 

Permissions and Settings

To create a project budget you must have one of the following permissions:

• You are the engagement manager, project manager, or on the PM Team and you have the stage based permission Create Baselines
• You have the cost center permission Maintain Projects and Engagements

To edit or delete a project budget you must have one of the following permissions:

• You are the engagement manager, project manager, or on the PM Team and you have the stage based permission Edit and Delete Baselines
• You have the cost center permission Maintain Projects and Engagements

The separation Create and Edit/Delete permissions allows you to setup an initial baseline, for example, an hours based budget, and disallow your PMs from changing it into a different type of budget.

The default budget for a new project is determined by the engagement type. To change the default see the engagement type editor's budget tab.

When your projects reach certain budget thresholds notifications may be sent out. See the Budget Alerts Editor to configure these.

To change active baselines requires both Create and Edit privileges.

Baselines

A baseline is a budget that defines what you plan to do for this project. You can have multiple baselines. With multiple baselines you can change your budgets as the project progresses, while preserving old budgets. This allows you to see how the project evolved over time and how well your budget forecasting played out. Each baseline can have multiple metrics. With multiple metrics you can look at numbers like RDC or BAR side-by-side. In addition, baselines can be broken down to a more granular level by adding a dimension like Resource or Task. As you can see, baselines are extremely flexible. For a more in depth explanation of baselines - please see Create a Time Baseline and Budgets, Tracking, and Alerts. 

New projects inherit a default budget type from its engagement type. New projects have an infinite budget amount, intended to not harass organizations who don't care about tracking to budget. You can imagine it being pretty annoying if an organization who doesn't care about budgets gets a budget e-mail alert as soon as the first hour gets logged because the budget amount defaulted to zero.

Creating a new budget baseline, however, is different. When a user creates a new baseline, she is indicating that the organization does care about the budget, and thus takes on the responsibility of putting something in reasonable for the budget amount. 

Create a Baseline

Click the Create New Baseline button in the lower left of the budget editor.

Edit a Baseline

Once a baseline is created, its fundamentals can no longer be edited. For instance, dimension, time period, metric, etc. This is to preserve the historical record of what you used for baselines. The only thing that remains editable is the budgeted amounts. There are three types of budgets possible:

• No budget (infinite budget) - leave the budget amount as blank
• Zero - enter zero
• Positive - enter any number greater than zero

Delete a Baseline

Click the ( ) icon to open the Baseline Browser. Only inactive baselines can be deleted. If you want to delete an active baseline you will first need to create a new one, make it active, and delete the old one.

Manage Baselines

Click the ( ) icon to open the Baseline Browser. From here you can create new baselines or delete old baselines.

Settings

In the upper section you determine which baseline you are interested in, what metric (form of measurement) you want, and whether unapproved time or requested hours should affect the grids.

Grids

These three grids show you information about the projects performance to date, how well that performance matches your budget, and allows you to edit your budgets 

Current State Grid

Base on the Use Actuals Through Date, this grid shows information about what has been done so far and what is left to be completed. The unit shown (money or hours) is based on the selected metric in the Performance to Budget Grid.

Performance to Budget Grid

The performance to budget grid shows how well your project is performing overall compared to your baseline and metric. To change Baselines or Metrics, use the dropdown lists in the upper right.

Budget Baseline Grid

This grid shows your budget performance broken down by the baseline's dimension. For example, you can see how well each individual resource is performing to budget. You can show additional detail in this grid by clicking on Customize View and ticking off additional rows to display. You can also enable/disable time-phased totals from the customize screen.

Customize View

The customize view screen allows you to control the level of detail that you see as well as how you want to view the data. Depending on whether you are customizing the Time subtab or the Cost subtab, one of the following two screens is shown. The information is essentially the same, but one references revenue while the other references disbursed amount.

Summary Performance

In addition you specify the Use Actuals Through Date here. Please see the help link for more information about this date.

Display Totals

Choose either Period Totals or Cumulative Totals. Period totals are used when Project Managers are looking to analyze run rates, while Cumulative totals are used when PMs are looking to understand the cumulative performance over and up to a particular point in time.

Display

Tick the checkbox for each data point you want to view on the budgets tab.

Use Actuals Through Date

Use actuals through – Choose a date for reporting actual data. After choosing the date, all data displayed on and before this date will be actual time/cost information, while all information following this date will be projected data. To choose a date, you may select any of the options listed below. Note that the end of a week is based on the day chosen as the first day of the week in the initial setup for your organization.