Budgets
Corvin Adkins
Budget feature where we can assess how much projects are. Also track totals as supplies are acquired as necessary.
A budget feature would help tremendously for us (we are non-profit). We have projects that require funds to complete which either have to be approved (where funds have to be raised) in order to complete or sometimes denied. We used custom fields in trello for estimates for the projects so we could see if we would have funds or create a new project to raise the funds to complete said project. Additionally, we would track costs of regular projects using custom fields etc. So having some kind of calculation/budget feature along with your invoice may be more comprehensive and flexible. Thanks for your consideration.
Log In
Caroline Ginty
Hi everyone - I'd love to know more about what you're looking for here and where the gaps are with our existing Formulas capabilities. For example, are you looking to be able to roll up Formula (or number) fields from tasks on a list to the list as a whole? View this information in dashboards? Something else entirely? Thanks in advance for your input!
Mackenzi A
Caroline Ginty Our We need the ability to see how much $$ is left in a budget across selected lists/tasks, based on time logged and the hourly rates of team members.
Pierre Becher
Caroline Ginty This can be played in various different ways. The biggest issue I see here is that for proper budgeting you need to be able to assign a time and/or monetary budget to a project or a client. Most of the time the client is represented by a space or folder and the project by a list, so logically we would need to be able to assign a time estimate or monetary custom field to a space, folder or list. Second, we would then need to be able to track against these budgets from tasks data being rolled up. Third we, would then need to be able to see all of this nicely in an overview, which could be a dashboard or a higher-level overview. Second dimension of complexity here is the fact that there can be all sorts of different budget types for various businesses: time-based or fixed-feee budgets, client-based or project-based budgets, plus user or role-based budgets.
w
webks: websolutions kept simple
Caroline Ginty I guess there are different needs in this issue. And I think there may be other milestones needed for some of them, like assigning rates to billable hours tracked and to extend time tracking with expense tracking (like for example activecollab does).
The big picture for us:
Being able to assign a project (which might be a list or a task?) a certain budget.
When tracking time or expenses this budget is then used till zero (or below becomes minus). This way you could ensure your project is on the right financial track.
Other helpful results from this would be:
- Sell prepaid hour packages
- Compare the costs spent (used budget) to the project
- ...
That would be another level for ClickUp, but well it would be super cool :)
Summing things up I'd saw it's more important for now to first solve the tasks on the way there, but see the large picture :)
Does this help?
Surely there are other ideas for other cases!
David Begin
Caroline Ginty Right now, I'm easily able to track how much we have spent so for. I created a new field for the ''Expense Category'' and a new field for the ''Expense Month''. What I'm missing right now is to be able to assign a budget for each expense categories and quickly see how much I have remaining.
Right now, I'm tracking all expenses in Clickup, but I have to use a Google Sheet (embedded in my list) to track how much money I have left in my budget for each expense category. I'd be happy to share how I work more in details if that would help.
The goal for me would be to get rid of managing it in Google Sheets.
Patty Tulloch
Caroline Ginty I agree with a lot of what Pierre is saying. It would also be helpful to be able to set automations against a budget so for example you can receive a notification when you are at 80% of the budget for a project or client (at space, folder, and list level). We have Clients with multiple projects that sit under one budget but have estimates based on the various projects so we need a granular and rollup view of how our time tracking is doing against the budget for the entire client and individual projects and ideally would have notifications in place when we are reaching set limits or milestones.
Sebastian Chedal
Caroline Ginty We are a digital agency with different budget models for different accounts. On some accounts we charge the client a different hourly rate based on the person. On others it is based on the role they are fulfilling for that client (so people might wear different hats at different times).
Right now your formulas only let us calculate time spent on a task, multiplied by some rate (custom field) equals some cost.
this cost first of all needs to be private and controls by permissions, so not all fields should be visible to all members.
next, the entire time on a task can't be multiplied by the same cost variable because different people might need to log time on the same task. A Project manager might clock at a different rate on the same clickup task than a data scientist or software architect, or our C-level consultants.
So the time tracking itself is what needs to have the variable rate abilities.
Additional acceptance criteria for this also includes:
- there should be a way to input rate changes for someone that are effective from X date because people get raises or we raise a client rate, but we don't want that to retroactively affect past reporting for existing time that was logged and it has to have a start date that you can set on the rate change that isn't only immediate.
- there should be a default rate for people, that you can override per space or folder or list for maximum flexibility.
- you should be able to pull a report of time spent, with rates and costs listed, for X time period. Which means in that case only the time on tasks that had time logged in that time period would display costs on them.
- you would expect a dashboard you can build, that you can also show a client that has budget spent, minus all the costs indicated against that budget so you can effectively monitor time spent remaining and budget spent remaining.
- you should be able to have the budget itself increase automatically each interval you set by a fixed amount (for example add $5,000 each start of month).
- another display you should be able to see and share should show thje budget either in weekly or monthly steps, with a line across the horizontal that is your max budget and a line that shows each month/week the budget being spent up to that ceiling so you can visualize your burn rate.
Finally another aspect to this, that would add a lot of value is internal rates, in addition to setting external rates, which is what a client gets charged, add internal rates that we can also set by person, role and have a default that you can override per space/folder/list.
All the same reporting should be possible with internal rates and also restricted permissions that are distinct from external rates.
To fully evaluate the external-internal rate you would also need another private dashboard where you can view the difference of the two, meaning the external rate/cost (revenue) minus the internal rate/cost (expenses/COGS) to display the gross profit of the project.
If you have further questions to implement this feature, you can reach out to me directly as a stakeholder.
Kim Hoang (BF)
Caroline GintyWE NEEED:
- BAC: Budget at Completion: Is how much this project is budgeted for by the time it's completed, meaning the total budget for the project.
- AC (ACWP): Actual cost wok performed
- EAC: Estimate at Completion: You estimate how much it will cost you to do the outstanding work. This is the amount we expect the project to cost, based on where we are relative to cost and schedule.
- ETC: Estimate to Completion : This is simply how much more we expect to spend from this point forward based on what we've done so far. It can be easily backed into by taking our estimate at complete (what we expect to spend) and subtracting what we have spent so far (Actual Cost).
- VAC: The difference between what we originally budgeted and what we expect to spend
------------------------------------------------
Given ClickUp's organizational structure of Workspace > Folder > List, I plan to utilize:
- Workspace for Portfolio Management
- Folder for Program Management
- List for Project Management
To comprehensively assess the financial perspective at every level of portfolio, program, and project, manual input of data will be necessary for each list, as depicted in the attached Excel screenshot. Subsequently, we can utilize the Dashboard feature to link various data tasks or metrics from the lists with ClickUp Dashboard https://help.clickup.com/hc/en-us/articles/6312197753239-Intro-to-Dashboards
Watch this video so you will understand how Earned Value can be used for Budget data analyze https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DLyZjsrG14&feature=youtu.be
Phil Patelis
Caroline Ginty there is so much good info in this thread with tons of screenshots of ideas.
The bottom line is that any Professional Services firm needs to trend data over time. That means budgets vs actual, consumed time vs. budgeted time, etc.
We just need:
- Access to all our data
- The ability to plot that data however we want
Each time ClickUp tries to produce a dashboard, or a 'view' there are always limitations that means you cannot quite get what you want.
System Automation
Caroline Ginty ClickUp needs the addition of a Project object.
Not just at the top of a list or folder of space, but a separate object within the data model that can have all the high level data for a project. These could then be linked to all levels of the task hierarchy spaces/folders/lists/tasks either signally or multiple locations.
We would then be able to track at the project level roll-up data from all time tracked (normal and billable), use "expense" tasks to track expenditure, and monitor these against the project's overall budgets and effort. Other project information could also be stored, and give us other great features like linking "people" tasks for stakeholders ,and "risks" management, just to name a couple of the top of my head.
All "projects" could then be viewed, sorted, filtered and grouped on their own boards.
Jira had/has a similar issue of not including the idea of a "project" as an object in it's own right. However, they do have plug in tools available that give the functionality, allowing you to create a project and point it at the relevant task by use of a search query. See: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1212259/bigpicture-project-management-ppm?tab=overview&hosting=cloud
If you're wanting to elevate the ClickUp platform from a productivity/task management tool, to a real Project Management platform, this is a critical step. I reiterate from other feedback I've given, adding an "Overview" to a space or list is not good enough.
Brendon McCarthy
Caroline Ginty The responses above (and below, my own, dating back to 2+ years ago) explain that budgeting is not simply a re-use of existing functions like "formulas" and "dashboards". Rather, it is a well-designed feature that is specific to managing Budgets and flexible to accommodate multiple budgeting styles (by project, client, etc.)
There are competitors like Toggl who have recently improved their budgeting and billing features, making them first-class citizens and well integrated with Timesheets. This is what we, as professional service providers, are looking for from ClickUp, but even better.
L
Lynette Lamarque Wilson
Caroline Ginty I would love to see budget functionality like on Teamwork.com. There is a budget for the project (fixed fee, retainer, or standard) and hours logged pull from the budget to show what is remaining. You need to be able to update the budget as needed. An ability to deduct expenses is nice as well.
Dejan Kletečki
I would love to see this as native feature to reduce additional cost 3rd party cost. Just take a look what everhour did. That's perfect =)
P
Pamela Mellen
We're having to essentially create a hack to do this and combine it with tracking some things on a spreadsheet, when it seems so basic.
Something as simple as an hourly rate and somewhere to list expenses, to compare against a total budget.
It definitely needs to be at a List level, at least - tasks are too small-scale to oversee a full project.
I'm very surprised that an otherwise comprehensive PM tool doesn't have this feature.
Yigal Ohanna
Can you add a budget management tool for projects?
Julian Pustkuchen
Brendan W should this perhaps be merged with https://clickup.canny.io/feature-requests/p/budgeting-forecasting ?
R
Robert Sharp
Would really love a budgeting feature and the ability to assign cost per hour to specific people per project!
Brian Gotts
We're migrating to ClickUp from Asana right now. Thrilled with the expanded feature set and integrated time tracking. That said, disappointed with the limited ability to track budgets. Our business offers retainer services to clients and it's critical to track budgets that reset each month. For now, we'll continue using Everhour for this, but would love to reduce tools in the future.
A
Arief Trianto
in urgent need for this feature
David Begin
This is a must-have feature for an project management tool like Clickup!
Allen Jaffe
This is critical for us.
Load More
→