Project Budget

The Project Budget feature lets you draw a detailed budget for labor, expenses, and purchases associated with your project and track expenditure at the task, phase, or project level.

The feature lets you:

• Create budgets based on cost or billing.

• Keep different versions of the same budget. Budgets are archived automatically as new budgets are approved.

• Get an overview of project expenses and profitability. View budgeted totals as well as monthly, quarterly, category-level, and task-level details.

• Submit multiple budgets for approval for the same project, compare up to five budgets side by side and approve the most realistic scenario.

• Compare your project expenditure (actuals) against planned budgets.

• Identify budget variances with customizable color coding for budget items that are on or off target, based on the percentage of planned versus actual expenditure.

To enable this feature, contact OpenAir Customer Support. OpenAir Customer Support can also enable related optional features and change related configuration settings.

• The Task on Purchase Request optional feature lets you add task-level granularity for purchase requests and items.

• An optional feature lets you add Estimate to Complete (ETC) and Estimate at Completion (EAC) columns to total columns in the budget, actuals, and compare screens. The ETC and EAC values are calculated automatically when you save changes to your project budget.

  For more information, see Estimate to Complete (ETC) and Estimate at Completion (EAC) in Project Budgets.

• Your account can be configured to let you compare actual project costs against different project budget scenarios:

  • Normal, Optimistic, Pessimistic, Most Likely scenarios using a three point estimate (triangular or double-triangular distribution).

  • Normal, Optimistic, Pessimistic scenarios using a simplified contingency factor. The contingency factor setting lets you define optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for each project as a percentage of the planned costs. See Creating a Project Budget or Modifying Project Budget Properties.

After you enable the feature, you can:

• Enable project level approvals for project budgets. See Approval Options.

• Set account-wide preferences for the Project Budget feature, including color coding for budget variances. See Account-Wide Project Budget Preferences.

See the following help topics:

• Project Budget List View

• Project Budget Page

• Creating a Project Budget or Modifying Project Budget Properties

• Approving and Unapproving a Budget