Contract Budget
Overview:
This screen is accessed via a tab within the desired Contract.
Budgets in Workbench are an essential part of controlling your job costing throughout your business. Budgets are used not only for productive jobs, but administrative jobs as well to track spending against a target. Budgets are an internal spending measurement and should match your company's methodology for tracking jobs rather than your client expectations; budgets and their corresponding reports are generally only for internal use. Contract Schedules should relate to the total budgeted amounts, but are independent for the use of claiming from your clients.
Budgets are divided into types, and you can have as many budget containers as your project needs. For straightforward projects, one Original Contract budget container can be used to hold the entire budget, whereas staged projects can be divided into one container per stage to keep things organised. Variations are traditionally created in a unique container for each variation number, with the Internal Reference usually representing the sequence number. Budgeted revenue for each budget container can then be sent to Contract Schedules to ease the data entry burden - this is most often done with Variations as they are awarded. You can also send budgeted costs directly to new Purchase Orders and Work Orders through the budget screen. The Contract Summary tab is the most optimal way to view budgets and schedules from a high level perspective.
Contract Budgets are a more consolidated way to approach Job Budgets, and are visually very similar to that screen. The benefit of managing your budgets through this Contract tab is being able to expand each budget using the blue + button to see what budget lines each one contains.
Screen Guide:
+ New Budget will open the new budget screen; see the Create/Edit Budget page for more information.
+ New Journal will also open a new budget screen, with the key difference that a Journal must be balanced, i.e., the totals must equal 0 or a net gain/loss of nothing. Journals are used to make adjustments to originally budgeted amounts without changing the original budget itself, increasing transparency and traceability in the movement of budgets. A use example would be that we originally budgeted for $10,000 of a specific material, but this was in error; we would create a Journal with the first line negating the $10,000 using negative numbers in the same Work Breakdown as the original line, then a positive $10,000 to the correct Job/Work Centre/Activity combination. The total would equal $0 and is therefore balanced, allowing you to save the Journal.
Filters are available to narrow down the budgets you wish to see. If visiting this tab by clicking view on a budget type on the Contract Summary tab, the display will automatically be filtered to that type.
The + icon at the beginning of each line expands the contents of the budget container. You can then scroll down to see the detailed lines without having to enter the budget editing screen.
# represents the sequence number of the budget containers. This is used as the default sorting column.
Budget Type can be any one of the standard budget types:
Original Contract - for all budgets that were part of the original contract that was signed.
Approved Variations - for all variations that have been approved. The type can be changed later once the approval occurs.
Increased Costs - a budget type only for situations that have a cost element but no revenue. The system will not allow revenue to be entered for this budget type.
Other Costs - a generic type that your company can use in whatever manner it deems appropriate.
Recharges - a type that is used in situations where an existing budget has been recharged from your company to another by the client. These are meant to be negative budget variations or scope reductions.
Contract Contingency - this can be used to hold contingency amounts held for future variations or overruns.
Unapproved Variations (in Forecast) - Variations that are to be requested but not yet approved can be entered using this type. In Forecast means that when the forecast is generated, it will include this budget in the calculation. It is therefore recommended that only variations that are likely to move forward are entered using this type.
Risk (in Forecast) - this type can be used in a variety of ways, one being a place to put a positive expectation of cost that has not yet been realised (no orders, invoices, or timesheets have been created yet for the expectation). In Forecast means that when the forecast is generated, it will include this budget in the calculation.
Unapproved Variations (not in Forecast) - Variations that are to be requested but not yet approved can be entered using this type. Not In Forecast means that when the forecast is generated, it will exclude this budget in the calculation. It is therefore recommended that only variations that are less likely to move forward are entered using this type.
Risk (not in Forecast) - this type can be used in a variety of ways, one being a place to put a positive expectation of cost that has not yet been realised (no orders, invoices, or timesheets have been created yet for the expectation). Not In Forecast means that when the forecast is generated, it will exclude this budget in the calculation.
Budget Header is the Hierarchy Level 1 Job, or the top level job of the current contract. Budget containers can have lines for multiple jobs in the contract.
Internal Reference is a free text field that keeps your budgets organised. This can be whatever your company needs it to be to match internal expectations. It is recommended that variations are labelled with the number of the variation that the budget represents.
Client Reference is an optional field that can be used to label the budget something that your external stakeholders refer to it as. The typical use case of this field is when your client refers to your variations as something other than what your company traditionally labels them.
Description is custom text meant to define what the budget container represents. This is important for variations to make sure your team knows what the variation signifies.
Year/Period is the financial year and period in which this budget was created. Note that this field will affect which forecast/cash flow periods this budget is recognised in; forecasting a year/period previous to the budget year/period will not recognise the budget.
Budget Date is the date that was entered as the creation date for this budget.
Cost is the total cost amount of all lines that this budget contains.
Revenue is the total revenue amount of all lines that this budget contains.
Approved Date is the date that this budget was approved if your company uses budget approval.
Next Steps:
Please refer to Create/Edit Budget for more information on creating new budget or editing existing ones.