Forecasting charts in Productive help you plan ahead and check whether your budgets are financially on track.

They combine past data with scheduled bookings, so you can anticipate when a budget might be depleted and whether it will remain profitable.

To use the charts, make sure you first add bookings for teammates in the Resource Planner. After scheduling people on upcoming budgets and their services, open the budget of your choice.

Enabling the Forecasting Chart

Open the budget and go to the Overview tab.
In the upper-right corner, select Show forecast chart.

The chart will then appear in the Overview tab, split into two sections: Budgeting and Profitability.

Budgeting Chart

The Budgeting section provides a detailed overview of how resources and funds are allocated and utilized throughout the budget.

Billable Time: Time that can be billed to your client.
Total Scheduled Time: Time allocated using bookings in the Resource Planner.
Budget Total: The agreed budget amount.
Budget Used: What has been spent so far, based on work logged.
Budget Used (Forecasted): An estimate of how much of the budget will be used, based on scheduled future bookings.

📌 Example: You set your budget between June 1 and October 31, 2025, with a budget total of €57,100.00. In June, you allocated all the estimated hours from the budget in the Resource Planner as bookings and spread them evenly, so all the work time has been planned out.

The chart reflects this planning. Since billable time in the chart represents approved time, all time entries in the Time tab were approved, and every booking had the Autotrack option enabled.

Current month view: Out of 320 budgeted hours, the team has logged and approved 234h, meaning most of the planned time has already been tracked. The budget shows 28% remaining, consistent with the tracked hours.
October view: The chart shows no remaining time (all budgeted hours are used), and the budget is nearly fully spent. The 1% left represents billable expenses that are part of the budget but have not yet been logged.

Profitability Chart

The Profitability section focuses on whether the budgeted work remains profitable.

Worked Time: The total hours that team members have logged against the services in the budget.
Total Scheduled Time: Time allocated using bookings in the Resource Planner.
Revenue: The income generated from the budget.
Profit: The financial gain calculated by subtracting the total costs (including the cost of work and other expenses) from the revenue.

📌 Using the same budget setup (June 1–October 31, 2025, total budget of €57,100.00, 320 estimated hours booked in the Resource Planner with Autotrack and approvals enabled), here’s how profitability is reflected in the snapshot.

Current month view: Out of 320 budgeted hours, the team has logged and approved 198:57h, leaving 38% (121:03h) remaining. The profitability snapshot shows €35,520.00 in revenue, €4,693.42 in costs, and €30,826.58 in profit (87%).
October view: By the end of the budget, all 320 hours are logged and approved. The snapshot reflects the full period: €57,100.00 in revenue, €7,382.53 in costs, and €49,717.47 in profit (87%).

Reading the Charts

You'll notice that the Budget Total and Budget Used lines are not solid at certain points, indicating forecasted future data based on time (bookings) added to the Resource Planner.

For a detailed overview of forecasted data, hover over any future point on the chart.
In the example below, you can see what will happen in early November 2024: the "Budget used" is forecasted to burn the "Budget total".

📌 Clicking on the point in the graph will also update the forecasted budget data below the carts.

For a more precise forecast, switching to Week view allows us to see that the budget will be depleted in W46 of 2024.

Changing the Period

You can tweak the data using the dropdown menus. View your data by choosing between the following:

Cumulative (highlights the overall trend and growth over time) or Per-period (a snapshot view of the selected period)
Year, Quarter, Month, Week, Fiscal Year or Quarter for a more broad or granular overview of your budget
Select which year, quarter, month or week you'd like to focus on