Terminology

This table describes terms that are relevant to project budgeting:

Term	Description
Bottom-up Estimating	Estimating the budget amount for individual periods, budget items, and activities, and rolling-up the individual estimates to calculate a project total.
Spreading	The allocation or distribution of budget amounts to project activities across time periods for budgetary or project performance measurement.
Budget Adjustment	The undistributed budget amount, or the amount of the budget that has not been distributed to periods.
Costing Activity	An activity to which budget amounts are assigned. These are activities at the activity costing level.
Distributed Budget	Represents budget amounts that have been distributed to periods. After you distribute a budget adjustment to periods, the system updates the distributed budget with that amount and changes the budget adjustment amount to zero.
Estimating	Developing an approximation of the costs of resources needed to complete project activities. Resources can include labor, equipment, material, and so on. Estimates do not involve allocating or distributing costs across time periods for budgetary or project performance measurement.
Project Charging Level and Activity Costing Level	The project charging level is the level in the work breakdown structure (WBS) at which project budgets are maintained. If you use PeopleSoft Program Management, you can select a project charging level of either the detail activity level, or an activity costing level that is a higher WBS level than detail activities. If you use PeopleSoft Project Costing without PeopleSoft Program Management, the project charging level is always the detail activity level.
Target Budget	The sum of a budget adjustment and the distributed budget. The budget adjustment can be added to or subtracted from the distributed budget to calculate the target budget.
Top-down Estimating	Typically uses the actual cost of a previous, similar project, or a lump sum of money that is available for a project, as the basis for estimating the cost and revenue of the current project and applying it to down to the activity, budget item, and period level.