Delivering a budget in Productive marks the completion of all work associated with that budget. This step ensures that all time entries are finalized, preventing any further tracking of time on the budget.
Once a budget is delivered, you are ready to invoice your client for the work completed. Follow the steps below to deliver a budget and understand the implications of this action.
Why Deliver a Budget?
Delivering a budget signifies that all work has been completed, all time entries and expenses have been recorded, and the budget is ready for invoicing.
It locks the budget to prevent any additional time and expense tracking, ensuring that the recorded data is final and accurate.
Additionally, if you have Fixed billing type services in your budget and have tracked time against such services, your remaining budget revenue may be set to be recognized on the budget delivery date. Learn more about revenue recognition here.
Note: Delivering the Budget Without Approving All Expenses
If you are using expense approvals, and if you check the "Allow delivering this budget with unapproved or rejected expenses" box, you can deliver the budget even if there are pending (unapproved) or rejected expenses.
Here’s how unapproved and rejected expenses are handled:
Unapproved expenses generate a cost but do not generate a billable amount (budget used).
Rejected expenses do not generate a cost or a billable amount (budget used).
This is useful when you need to finalize and deliver a budget on time without waiting for expense approvals, especially when the expenses are not critical to billing.
Steps to Deliver a Budget
Complete All Work: Ensure that all tasks and services related to the budget are finished.
Enter All Time Entries: Make sure that all team members have logged their time entries for the budget. Once the budget is delivered, no further time entries can be added.
Deliver the Budget: Navigate to the budget you wish to deliver. Confirm that all required work and entries are complete, then mark the budget as delivered by selecting the Delivered tag located under the budget name.
Tip: If you need to make any adjustments after delivering the budget, no worries. As an admin or the budget owner, can reopen it, make the necessary changes, and then deliver it once more.
Delivering Budgets in Bulk
If you manage a large number of budgets each month, manually delivering each one can be time-consuming. To save time, you can now deliver multiple budgets at once using the Deliver bulk action on the Budgets tab.
How It Works
Select the budgets you want to deliver from the budgets screen (Financials > Budgets).
Click Deliver from the bulk actions menu.
Choose a Delivered Date using the date picker. This date will be applied to all selected budgets.
Optionally, check the Remove Future Bookings box to remove any previously made bookings from the Resource Planner.
Error Handling
If any budgets cannot be delivered, you'll see error messages explaining why. Hovering over the error message will show more details. Possible reasons include:
The budget contains unapproved or rejected time entries.
The budget contains unapproved expenses and "Allow delivering this budget with unapproved or rejected expenses" is not enabled.
The selected delivery date falls within a financially closed period.
📌 Note: All budgets delivered in bulk will share the same delivery date.
Notifications for Uninvoiced Budgets
Productive will notify you if there are delivered budgets that have not yet been invoiced. You'll see a red exclamation mark next to the budgets with past end dates.
This reminder helps ensure that you do not forget to invoice your client for the completed work, maintaining accurate financial records and client billing.
Marking a Budget as Invoiced
If you’ve completed all work on a budget but don't need to create an invoice, you can manually mark the budget as invoiced.
This feature is particularly useful when dealing with rounding discrepancies or budgets invoiced externally.
Marking the budget as invoiced will remove the "Budget needs invoicing" notification and update the invoicing status, without creating an actual invoice. You can also do this in bulk for multiple budgets.
Find out more about this feature here.
