Recurring budgets are key features in Productive, offering agencies efficient ways to manage ongoing client work and maintain financial stability.
For instance, imagine a marketing agency that secures retainer agreements with clients for services like social media management and advertising campaigns.
Similarly, consider a web development agency that relies on maintenance contracts, ensuring that client websites receive timely updates and technical support.
In both cases, managing these recurring commitments using automatically generated budgets improves resource utilization and simplifies operations.
Productive automates these processes by creating recurring budgets based on your agency's needs, whether triggered weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at other intervals.
In this article, we'll look at how to create recurring budgets and the best ways to incorporate them into your agency workflow.
Recurring budgets are available on Premium, Enterprise, Professional, and Ultimate plans.
Setting up a Recurring Budget
To set up a recurring budget in Productive:
Navigate to the desired budget, head over to the Recurring tab, and select the "Make this a recurring budget" option.
Choose the recurring interval (weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannually, annually) and specify the date for the next occurrence. This date marks when Productive will automatically generate a new budget.
Optionally, define an end date for the recurring budget, or leave it blank for indefinite recurrence.
Save your settings. If any adjustments are needed later, select the "Edit recurring" option or halt the recurrence altogether by selecting "Stop recurring".
In the "Recurring" tab, under the "All monthly budgets" section, you can view a list of all recurring occurrences.
Triggering Next Occurrence
While recurring budgets are automatically generated based on the specified interval, you also have the option to manually trigger the creation of the next budget.
This feature enables immediate budget creation rather than waiting for the next scheduled occurrence.
Scheduling People on Future Recurring Budgets
Currently, scheduling individuals on future (recurring) budgets that haven't yet started or been created is not supported in Productive.
In other words, you cannot assign people to inactive budgets.
However, you can employ a workaround by manually triggering the next budget occurrence, which allows you to create bookings for the newly generated budget.
Managing Recurring Bookings
With recurring budgets in Productive, you have versatile options for managing ongoing bookings efficiently.
For instance, you can create repeat bookings that automatically transition to new budgets triggered by recurring intervals.
Alternatively, you can manage large bookings (e.g. spanning across several months)
by triggering the budget to distribute the bookings across multiple periods.
Recurring Budget Expenses
Productive now includes the option to copy expenses on recurring budgets. When setting up a recurring budget, you can enable the option to copy expenses for each occurrence.
If this option is turned on, any expenses in the original budget will be copied to the new recurring budget.
Note that while expense attachments, custom fields, the expense description and the amount you added to the original expense will be transferred to the new budget expense, the expense payment status will be reverted to Unpaid and the payment date, as well as reimbursement details, will not be copied to the new expense details.
The date of the new expense will be updated to match the start date of the new budget. For instance, if the new budget starts on August 1st, the expense dates will also be set to August 1st.
In case you have expense approvals switched on, the new expense will not be automatically approved. The approver (budget owner) will receive a notification each time the budget is created.
Original expense:
Copied expense:
Adding Rollover Hours
With the Retainer Hours Rollover feature, you can carry over unused or overused hours from one budget period to the next.
When creating or editing a recurring budget, you can enable the "Roll over unused hours to next occurrence" option.
This addition allows you to track how many hours are rolled over each month, giving you valuable insights into service profitability. For more details, refer to our article on Retainer Hours Rollover.