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Budget and estimates

If you have fixed fee projects, you can track their progress and see how much of the budget was spent by setting estimates in monetary terms. You'll also get alerts when you're about to go over budget.

Project budget is an extra feature, which you can enable by upgrading your workspace to Pro or Enterprise plan. You can try out the feature for free by activating the free 7-day trial (no credit card required).

Defining project budget​

To set project budget, go to some project's settings tab and under Estimate, select "Project budget":

  • You can set an overall project budget using the Manual option.
  • Or you can choose Task-based and then define budget for each individual task on the project (the project's overall progress will always be the sum of all its task budgets). When project budget is selected, project's status tab and its progress bar will reflect the billable amount of each entry on the project vs the budget, and show you how much was spent and how much remains.

Alerts always consider project status, and will be sent no matter if the project estimate is defined in time or budget.

Recurring estimates​

If you have projects that have the same budget each month, you can check the "Budget (or Estimate) resets every month" option in a Project's Settings tab (located beneath the estimate section). When budget/estimates resets each month, on each 1st of the month, the progress bar for the project will return to 0%.

Only time entries that belong to the current month will be considered in the "Tracked vs Estimated" section of the project status. Alerts also take into consideration the reset option.

Excluding non-billable time​

If you track both billable and nonbillable time on a project, but have an agreement with a client for a certain number of billable time, you can exclude nonbillable time from counting against the estimate.

Go to some project's settings and under "Time estimate" enable "Don't include nonbillable time" for that project.

Then, for example, if you have project estimate for 10h and you've tracked 1h billable and 9h nonbillable, project progress will count only the billable time and show 10% progress.

Project alerts also won't count non-billable time against project progress.

Estimates in reports​

You can open Summary report and click "Show estimates" to see estimates and budget for each project and task right there in the report, next to tracked time.

You can also download the report with estimates via export, or share the estimate numbers when you share a report.

Note: CSV exports have estimates only if last level of grouping is either Project or Task (eg. Project>User export won't have estimate, while User>Project will have estimate).

Only admins can see, share, and download estimates in reports.

Permissions​

Who can see budget depends on "Who can see billable rates" and "Who can see project status" from workspace settings:

  • Admins can see and set project budget on all projects
  • Project managers can see and set project budget only if they can see billable rates. Otherwise, they can only see the progress
  • Regular users can't set budget. If they can see project status, they can see progress, plus if they can see billable rates they can see exact budget.