Viewing Budgets / Email Notifications

Approved Estimates become the Budget of the projects. That budgeted amount can be viewed in several areas of the system, along with email notifications based on the actuals entered exceeding a percentage of the budgeted amount.

Three types of budget breakdown

When running reports and viewing budgets, it's good to have the knowledge of the three type of budget terms. These are:

Original Estimate

The total of ALL Approved Estimates that DO NOT have Change Order checked.

Change Order Estimate

The total of ALL Approved Estimates that DO have Change Order checked. 

Total Estimate

The total of ALL Approved Estimates regardless if Change Order is checked or not.

Est Hours column from the project schedule

The hours on the left represent the Total Approved Hours in the Budget.

The hours on the right represent the Total Allocated Hours on the Task.

NOTE: These can differ, however, you typically want them to be matching.

Project Budget

You can view and slice the data in multiple ways right from the Budget section within a project. 

Project Budget (Estimates)

Active project widget

To have a bird eye view of each project's LIVE budget, you can add various budget columns to the Active Projects widget.

The money status icon refers to the percentage chosen on the backside of the widget. For more on this, refer to the Active Projects Dashboard guide.

NOTE: The money status icon in the My Task widget reflects the hours allocated, not the hours budgeted.

Reports

You can customize the Menu > Projects > Projects listing screen with various budget columns that allow for more reporting capabilities than the active project widget.

There is also the very useful Project Budget Analysis report that offers a very detailed view of all project budgets in one report.

Notifications

To receive one day email alerts of your project budgets, you can enable the Overbudget Projects notification from your employee record. For more on this refer to the Notifications Tab guide. You go to Connections > Emails to choose what time of day you want the email notification to be sent.

Next Steps

Using Estimates on Project Templates