Viewing budgets & email notifications [in-depth guide]
Guide contents: Types of budget breakdown | Est hours column from the project schedule | Project budget | Active project page | Reports | Notifications | Next steps
Approved estimates become the project budget. 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 know the 3 types 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 & slice the data in multiple ways right from the Budget section within a project.
Project budget for estimates [in-depth guide]
Active project page
To have a birds 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 [in-depth 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 daily 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 [in-depth guide]. You go to Connections > Emails to choose what time of day you want the email notification to be sent.