Not all projects have their budgets established the same way. Projectworks offers three different methods for setting the fees/budgets for projects.
Project pricing/budget options
When creating a project you are able to build your budget with different levels of granularity. The simplest way is to set a fee for each phase/budget line within your project, but you can also build the pricing from the "bottom up" basing it on hours and rates.
Every pricing options contain a concept of a budget - a phase of a project that has specific fee or price associated with it e.g. ‘Phase 1, Phase 2’ or ‘Discovery, Analysis, Development’.
Explore the different pricing options:
- "Top Down" setting fees against budget lines
- Set fees against timecodes
- "Bottom up" using hours and rates per role, per timecode
"Top down" Budget-level - Fee-based pricing
- Create a budget for each phase/budget line you want to track. You will need to create separate budgets for time (effort worked) and expenses (e.g. licenses, hosting fees, travel costs).
- Assign a financial amount to each budget line.
- Create as many timecodes as needed within each time budget.
This option is great for Project Managers who don't need to tightly plan and track work at a granular level.
Timecode level - Fee-based pricing
- Create a budget for each phase/budget line you want to track. You will need to create separate budgets for time and expenses.
- Within each time budget create as many timecodes as needed and assign these a dollar amount.
- The sum of these are your budget amounts.
- In this mode only expense budgets are assigned a dollar amount
This option gives Project Managers more granularity. It is recommended if you split your budgets into smaller breakdowns of work and want to track this.
"Bottom up" Timecode level - Hourly-based pricing (hours x rate)
- Create a budget for each 'chunk' of work you want to track. You will need to create separate budgets for time and expenses.
- Within each time budget create as many timecodes as needed
- Within each timecode assign roles with the number of hours and billable rate (e.g. Senior Consultant for 100hr x $150 per hr). This calculates the dollar fee for each timecode. The sum of these are your budget amounts.
- Everything is “bottom-up” so any changes you make will impact the timecode and budget amounts.
- In this mode only expense budgets are assigned a dollar amount
This option is great for Project Managers who want to track their projects at a granular level and/or by the hour.
Ongoing budget management
Once you have set up your budgets, you can reorder them. This allows more flexibility in the way the budgets are displayed, especially if they are not entered in to Projectworks sequentially or additional budgets are added after the project has already kicked off.
The budget lines will be defaulted to this order in other parts of the system that use budget information, such as the forecast screens or when creating invoices screen or quotes.
