Engagement Type - Budgets Tab

This tab determines the default budget types for new projects. Budgets are powerful tools for ensuring that your project is delivered on time and within costs. Setting default budget types allows you to standardize your engagements and projects across Projector. Then when you look at your dashboards or reports you know that you are comparing apples to apples.

Permissions and Settings

To edit Engagement Types you need the global permission Maintain System Settings set to update.

An engagement type must be marked as Billable on the general tab in order for Billing Adjusted Revenue, Contract Revenue, and Chargeable Hours to be available metrics.

Engagement Budget Defaults

The Engagement Budget defines your time and cost budget metrics and amounts. You can then view performance to this budget on your Project Dashboard or in reports. As time and expenses are submitted against projects, not engagements, the numbers against the engagement budget are a rollup of the projects underneath it.

The Calculate engagement budgets based on the sum of project budgets checkbox causes the amount budgeted for the engagement to be driven by the projects underneath it. When this box is unticked you can type any engagement budget you want in. When it is ticked, it is driven by the projects instead. In the screenshot below you can see that the engagement budget is grayed out, and is the sum of the project budgets.

Why wouldn't you want the engagement budget driven by the project budgets? There are many business reasons for this disconnect, but here is a short list of some that we often see.

  • They are disconnected – perhaps there are multiple subprojects, but not all subprojects have been budgeted out yet
  • You track separate engagement and project budgets – you may want your PM's to track their projects by Hours while at the Engagement you only track Contract Revenue

You can prevent your engagement managers from changing engagement budgets through the Stage Editor.

Project Budget Defaults

This area determines the default budget types you want defined on new projects. For example, on all Fixed Price engagements you want to budget a maximum number of hours you think delivery should take. You can define multiple metrics if you want to track hours, billed time, and RDC all at once. However, one of these metrics has to be your primary metric. A primary metric is shown by default on your project dashboard and in baseline variance reports. This gives you a common budget that makes sense across projects. For example, a dashboard that shows hours on one project and revenue on another project isn't going to be particularly useful.

Your project managers will be responsible for entering the project and filling out budget numbers. If you don't want them to switch primary metrics, or add new budget types, you can control this through the Stage Editor permissions Project Managers can Edit Baselines and Project Managers can Create Baselines.

 

Display Budget Alerts on Time/Cost Approval for

When users are approving time, they have the option of seeing how that approval fits within overall budget goals before finalizing the approval. Will this approval exceed a budget? If so, then perhaps I need to take action prior to approving the cards. For example, splitting a time card and transferring part of it to another project.

Budget TypeDescriptionAlerts Are Shown To
Contract TermFor Not To Exceed contract types, warn when an approval exceeds the cap. Your cap is defined on the Engagement Contract Tab. This alert is only visible to users who are the engagement manager?
Engagement BudgetEngagement budgets are defined on the Engagement Budget Tab. These alerts are thrown when a ATD vs. BAC budget alert threshold is crossed. For example, you have burned down 75% of your billable hours.
  • Engagement managers +
  • Anyone who has the  cost center permission Maintain Projects and Engagements +
  • Anyone who can view all projects under the engagement
Project BudgetProject budgets are defined on the Project Budget Tab. These alerts are thrown when a ATD vs. BAC budget alert threshold  is crossed. For example, you have burned down 75% of your billable hours.Anyone who can view this project
Sub-project BudgetSub-project budgets are breakdowns of your overall project budget. they are defined on the Project Budget Tab. For example, create an individual budget for each resource on this project. These alerts are thrown when the budget for an individual bucket is exceeded. For example, Jim has used 11 hours of his 10 hour budget for this week.Anyone who can view this project
Task Hours BudgetTask budgets are set on the Project Task Planning Tab of a project. These alerts are thrown when the budget for an entire task is exceeded. For example, Sarah has used 11 hours of the 10 hours we thought this task would take.Anyone who can view this project