Zoho Projects now supports tracking budget with both Cost Budget and Budgeted Hours simultaneously across all modules (Based on Project, Phase, Task, or User).
Why Track Both?
Tracking both cost budget and budgeted hours provides a more holistic view of the project's financial health. While the cost budget focuses on the total expenditure, budgeted hours offer insights into the time required to complete the project. This approach allows users to:
identify potential cost overruns early when budgeted hours or budget costs are exceeded.
optimize resource allocation by comparing actual hours spent to budgeted hours.
improve project forecasting by accurate tracking of both cost and time.
For example, Zylker Constructions is managing a construction project with multiple phases including Foundation phase and would want to track the budget Based on Phase to ensure successful project completion.
Set the Cost Budget to $10,000 and Budgeted Hours to 500 hours for the Foundation phase when creating or editing a phase.
If the Foundation phase takes 550 hours instead of the planned 500 hours during the phase, the project manager can view this overrun from the project details page or the phase details page. This indicates that the phase is exceeding the Budgeted Hours.
The project manager can then decide whether to adjust the pace or allocate additional resources, potentially impacting overall costs.
The Budgeted Hours and Cost Budget fields are optional. Leave them blank if you choose not to track the budget in either way.
Budget details can be entered while creating a new Project and based on the type it should be calculated. For example, with the recent enhancements done, you would be able to track it based on four different modules:
1) Project
2) Milestones
3) Tasks
4) Users
Budget details:
Once the Project progresses based on applied work hours on Tasks (planned), Actual log hours, you should be able to view the progress in the Budget widget which is available in the Project Dashboard
3) Budget reports:
I am afraid we do not have specific reports related to Project budget but I believe we do have them in our future roadmap. However, you should still be able to view the overall Budget information for all the Projects in the Home -> Portfolio view.
To know more about Project budget, please refer to the user guide mentioned below:
In our organization there is no hours base billing, we consume our budget based on tasks/subtasks completed by user. Can we still use this feature to track our budget ?
Yes you can BUT not specifically when a Task is closed. You can setup the Budget type to be based on Task & billing method based on Task/Issue hours mentioned here:
However, you would still need to enter a specific cost and log hours for the Task in-order for the budget widget to take information from it. We do have plans to enhance this in future by providing roll up option using custom fields which will be tracked by the Budget widget.
Another alternative method would be to input the information in custom fields in Tasks and sync it to Zoho Analytics. Since we do not have a direct option at the moment, Analytics integration with Projects should provide you a suitable workaround.
Note: Zoho Analytics is an individual paid subscription of Zoho.
To know more about the integration between these two, please refer to the below help document:
If you would like to discuss about this further, please do get back to us via email (support@zohoprojects.com) and we would be happy to assist you with it.
Thank you.
Reply to Navya NuneA
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1) Project
I am afraid we do not have specific reports related to Project budget but I believe we do have them in our future roadmap. However, you should still be able to view the overall Budget information for all the Projects in the Home -> Portfolio view.
Thank you.