Creating/Managing Project Budgets

BigTime supports three different types of budgets, and different industries will use those budgets in different combinations. You can decide you're going to use just one of those budgeting options, or you can mix and match them to give your firm a level of budgeting detail that's right for you. Use one type of budget on some projects, and another type on others. Or, skip this subject entirely because your firm isn't interested in tracking budgets right now.

Each of these three types of budgets are created using the Budgets/Hours menu in the project dashboard. A specific step-by-step for each budgeting type can be found in the Budgeting chapter, but below is a brief overview of each of your budgeting options.

Estimate Budgets

Estimate Budgets can be created using the Budget/Hours...Estimate sub-menu. These are traditional project budgets, and are BigTime's most popular form of budgeting. You enter in a set of phases or tasks (called "budget items") into your project's dashboard and then estimate hours or fees or both.

Pipeline Budgets

Pipeline Budgeting can be used to track sales projections by providing a monthly revenue estimate for each project in the system. This gives your firm a chance to preview expected revenues and to compare them to actuals as the project proceeds. It's a general tool for predicting what your top line will look like over the next several months.

In addition to a pipeline of work in progress, your sales team can fill in pipeline budgets for prospects and likely closes so that you get a look at current vs. future revenue streams. This type of budget can be created from the Budget/Hours...General Budget screen.

Allocation Budgets

Allocation budgets break down your work on a per staff and per period basis. In other words, they assign hours weekly or monthly to specific staff members to be used on a specific project. (e.g. - "Joe Smith will be spending 40 hours next week on Project ABC").

This type of budget is especially useful for companies that tend to dedicated a resource to a specific account/project for the duration of that project. They let you indicate that a staff member is "committed" to that project for all or part of their next several months. To create or edit the staff allocation budgets on a project, take a look at the Budget/Hours...Staff Budget screen.

Allocation budgets can "roll up" from tasks that you've assigned to specific individuals, but they don't have to. You can simple allocate 20 hours per week of someone's time to a specific project in order to keep track of how "filled up" your staff is with client work.

Getting More Information on Budgeting in BigTime

We're just scratching the surface on budgeting in this topic, but our intent is simply to introduce you to the types of budgeting that BigTime can support. For a more complete review of these various budgeting scenarios, take a look at the Budgeting chapter.