Expense Budgets Overview

Expense Budgets improve the accuracy of your project finances by helping you plan for non-labor expenses and costs, independent from the labor planned in hours.

Project Permissions Needed: View Financials, Edit Financials

Overview

Expense Budgets improve the accuracy of your project finances by helping you plan for non-labor expenses and costs, independent from the labor planned in hours. Some of the most common examples of expenses you may want to budget for include travel, licensing fees, or material goods.

Expense Budgets are created and managed in the Expense Budgets tab in the project workspace.

Expense Budgets Tab

The Expense Budgets table shows the following information: 

• Name
• Description
• Expected By—When the expense is/expenses are expected to be incurred. This date is helpful for revenue and cost projections  and is used when calculating Project Completion Estimates.
• Associated Task—The task this expense budget is associated with. Associating a task allows you to report in Insights the impact expense budgets have on project financials at different stages of the project. Associating a task will not impact the task budget.
• Est. Cost—How much we expect to spend for this expense.
• Est. Fees—How much we expect to bill the client for this expense.
• Impacts Margin—Whether this expense should be included in Project Completion Estimates and affects revenue. If this is not checked, the expense will be marked as a pass-through expense, and the cost to the project will be zero.
• Billable—Whether this expense will be billed to the client.
• Fixed Fee—If checked, this indicates that the client will be billed a fixed fee regardless of the actual amount of the logged expenses. If not checked, each individual expense will be available to be billed to the client in invoicing.

Select the More (“   ”) icon for an expense budget to access the following actions:

• Edit
• Delete
  
  Note: An expense budget cannot be deleted if it is tied to any expenses. The expenses must be deleted or unassociated from any expense budget.

At the bottom of the Expense Budgets tab is the Summary Bar, which displays a summary of project financial information, including task and expense budgets, pass-through expenses, cost and fees from labor, and estimated margin.

Export Expense Budgets

To export expense budgets as a CSV file, select the Download as CSV (“   ”) icon to the upper right of the table.

How to Create an Expense Budget

1. In a project, select the Expense Budgets tab.
2. Click Add Expense Budget to the upper-right of the table.
3. In the modal that opens, fill out the following information:
   • Name—A descriptive name of what this budget is for.
   • Expected By—When the expense is expected to be incurred. This date is helpful for revenue recognition and is used when calculating Project Completion Estimates.
   • Associated Task—A task this expense is associated with. Associating a task allows you to forecast cost in terms of where expenses will be incurred in the project lifecycle. You can associate multiple expense budgets to the same task.
   • Description—A description of the expenses.
   • Billing Settings
     • Impacts Margin—Whether this expense should be included in Project Completion Estimates and affects revenue.
     • Billable—Whether this expense will be billed to the client.
     • Fixed Fee—If checked, this indicates that the client will be billed a fixed fee regardless of the actual amount of the logged expenses. Additionally, if the actual expenses logged to this expense budget exceed the estimated fees, only the estimated fees will be used in Project Completion Estimates.
   • Est. Cost—How much we expect to spend for this expense.
   • Est. Fees—How much we expect to bill the client for this expense.
4. Select Save.

Billing Settings

* When the Include Billable Expenses in Actual Fees Calculation project setting is checked. For more information about how these values are calculated, see the Project Completion Estimates article.

† If the itemized budget’s estimated fees are higher than the estimated cost, the logged expenses are marked up for invoices. The markup percentage applied to itemized expenses is calculated as (Expense Budget Est. Fees - Expense Budget Est. Cost) ÷ Expense Budget Est. Cost .