How come budget numbers in my reports are huge

When you look at budget information in reports, you may see unusually large numbers. Some reports where this can happen are the Baseline Variance, Project Portfolio, and Ginsu reports. These large numbers may be interfering with your roll ups. Why do they happen and what can you about them?


Why Large Numbers?

Where do the large numbers come from? When you define a budget in Projector, there are two valid values. A number or an infinity sign.

 

The infinity sign is really a placeholder for "I haven't set a budget up." However, this causes problems when we bring this project into a budget report. Projector returns a really large number in order to represent "infinity." 

You may be asking yourself - well why doesn't Projector just return zero or blank instead of a really big number? Great question!

Zero Budget

We have a reason for this. A zero budget is a real thing. You may have a zero budget for costs or a zero budget on billable amount for time. If we just turned 'infinity' into 'zero' you wouldn't be getting your real budget picture. The zeroes make it look like you are move over budget than you really are. 

Blank Budget

Unfortunately Excel treats blank pretty much the same as zero, so you have the same issues.

Infinite Budget

By setting an unset budget to a large number, we make these stand out so that you can deal with them. And it works, because you are here reading this! 


What can I do?

So now you know why it happens, what do you do? There are a few approaches here:


Filters

You can edit your report and go to the filters tab. From there, add the budget as a field and create a cut off at a big number.


Grouping

If you have particular groups of data where you want to separate infinite budgets, configure your report to do this. For example, you might configure your reports to group by Contract Terms, Metric, and then Project. This will cause all your infinite budgets for Billing Adjusted Revenue on FP projects to get grouped together, hopefully making all your infinite budgets group together too.



Get rid of unneccessary budgets

By default, your project may have two or three types of budgets. For example, Hours, Resource Direct Cost, and Billing Adjusted Revenue. If you have a Fixed Price budget of hours and never plan to use the other two types - remove them!