Budget overview
No matter how you create the budget (by winning a deal, from the projects or the budgets tab), and whether you're building it from scratch, editing an existing one, or creating one from a template, the budget overview remains consistent.
You also have the option to build your budget using the Simple Budget Editor, a simplified version of the Budget editor, which, after saving, leads to the same budget overview.
You'll find that the main budget components included in the budget overview consist of:
Navigation pane: Contains sections for Feed, Services, Time, Invoices, Expenses, and Recurring budgets.
Budget sidebar: Provides general budget information, details, project and email associations, client details, custom fields, and additional settings.
Budgeting and Profitability sections.
Budget editor: Allows setting up services, rates, billing types and units, your time-to-complete estimations, as well as defining time-tracking and booking restrictions.
Accessing the Budget editor
The budget editor can be accessed from different starting points:
1) If you disabled Open Hours and Expenses in the Budget settings, you'll need to access the Budget editor to add services when creating a budget.
Click on "+ Add services" to access the Budget editor and add the services you wish to include in your budget.
2) If you enabled Open Hours and Expenses, you'll initially see two service line items in your budget called "Open Hours" and "Open Expenses".
These are placeholders allowing time tracking and scheduling before adding detailed services.
It's recommended to edit these promptly as they lack service types and rates, impacting later profit and resource analysis.
To edit, select "Edit" in the upper right corner to access the Budget editor.
3) Another option is editing a previously set-up budget.
By clicking the "Edit" button in the upper-right corner, you'll access the Budget editor where you can add new service items, redefine billing types and units, input time-to-complete estimations, and set prices per unit/hour for the services offered.
Budget editor options
Within the Budget editor, you can manually add new service items by clicking "+ New item" or add your services from previously defined rate cards.
Each service line item section consists of:
Name: a short freehand description of the service.
The service type: what you offer to a client, as defined in the Settings, as well as your basis for later profit analysis.
Billing type: Time and materials, Fixed, Non-billable.
Billing unit: Hours, Days or Piece (mainly used for expenses).
Tracking options include:
Time tracking: click on the clock (🕑) icon to enable or disable it for the service.
Expense tracking: click on the receipt (📄) icon to enable or disable it for the service.
Booking (scheduling) in Resourcing: click on the calendar (🗓️) icon to enable or disable it for the service.Quantity (the number of hours, days or pieces of your service you are selling)
Price: the price of the service you offer to a client.
The total budget of that section, and budget per service
For detailed instructions on creating services and incorporating them into your sales deals and budgets, check out this article.
Additionally, click on the three-dot menu to the right of the service section name to add additional fields like Discount, Markup, Estimate, and service Description.
Pro tip: Internal projects provide a more straightforward budget overview compared to client projects.
Internal budgets reflect the time spent on internal activities (services), the users' cost of work on the services, as well as any additional expenses incurred on that budget.
Any services you add there will be classified as Non-billable, meaning you cannot bill for an internal project!
