Estimating

The most popular form of budgeting in BigTime is the estimate budget. Just about every industry has their own form of estimating, but all of them typically involve breaking down a project into component parts and attaching a budget to each part: an hourly budget, a dollar budget or both.

Examples of Estimate Budgets

As we work through estimates in this chapter, we'll use a budget that is similar to the following simple example. This simple budget is for a three phase project. We're expecting the project to take a total of 350 man-hours and we're expecting to charge the customer a total of $35,000.

Most real world estimates get a lot more complicated than this.

• Deadlines. You may have specific deadlines to meet for each of our three phases.
• Sub-Tasks. Each phase may have dozens of "sub-tasks" that need to be completed.
• Milestones. You probably have deliverables that need to be signed off on before a client considers each phase completed.
• Mixed Invoicing. You may be billing a customer differently for each phase (e.g. - phase 1 may be fixed-fee and due when the phase is completed and the other phases may be time & materials).
• Expense Budgeting. You might need to track a budget for pass-through expenses or sub-contractor fees, not just a set of items for your staff time.
• Additional Time/Expenses. You may have additional "work" that falls outside of these three phases (billable or not) that you'd like to track.

BigTime can accommodate all of that complexity. As we get deeper into this chapter, we'll introduce each of these additional items in turn. By the end of the chapter, you'll have a clear understanding of how to turn the simple budget at the top of this page into a real-world budget that is similar to the ones you work with every day.

What's a Budget Item? BigTime refers to the line items in your estimate ("phase 1", "phase 2", etc.) as "budget items" in all of its screens and reports. Your firm may call those items something different ("phases" or "tasks" or "contract items" or "deliverables").

You can use the Tools...System Settings...Vocabulary page to change the way BigTime refers to these items. Then, all of your screens/reports will use your firm's terminology.