Budget overview

Every project has one budget — a live spreadsheet that follows the money the whole way through the project: what you estimate, what you commit to vendors, what you actually spend, and what you invoice the client. It's the financial heart of the project.

Open the budget

From the sidebar, open Projects and click into a project.
Click the Budget tab.

Each project gets one budget automatically when the project is created, already seeded with a starting group — so there's nothing to set up before you start filling it in.

How the lifecycle reads across the sheet

The budget columns are grouped into color-coded bands, left to right, that mirror the life of the project. Each band has a heading you can see pinned above the columns as you scroll:

Details — what the line item is: its name, description, cost code, and cost type.
Estimating — your plan: quantity, unit, unit cost, margin, and the client price that flows onto proposals.
Costing — what's really happening: Budgeted Cost (what accepted client agreements committed), Committed (vendor orders), Vendor Bills, Hours and Time Cost (from time tracking), Actual Cost (approved bills plus labor), and projections.
Invoicing — Approved Price, Invoiced, Collected, and Receivable against the client.
Profit — planned vs. projected margin and profit.

Note

You don't enter Budgeted, Committed, Actual, or Invoiced figures by hand. They roll up automatically from the client agreements, vendor orders, bills, payments, and invoices you create elsewhere — the budget is where you watch them land. Until a client agreement is accepted on a line, Budgeted Cost has no agreed value and displays a dash, not $0.00.

Reading a cell: typed vs. computed

There are three kinds of cell, and the look tells you which is which:

Typed cells (Name, Quantity, Unit Cost, Margin %, and the three formula columns) are the ones you fill in. A single click selects one; a double click opens it for editing. The Taxable and Final cells are checkboxes — click one to tick or clear it.
Pick-one cells (Cost Code, Cost Type, Unit) carry a small chevron. Double-click one and the full list opens; keep typing and the list filters right inside the cell. A tick identifies an explicitly selected value.
Computed cells (Extended Cost, Profit, Committed, Invoiced, and most of the Costing/Invoicing/Profit bands) are derived for you. They render muted, and show a dash when there's nothing to total yet.

Hover the small ? on any column header to see exactly what that column tracks.

A couple of cell markers worth knowing:

An orange corner marker on a cell means you've changed it but haven't saved yet. A newly added row carries its marker in the row-number gutter instead.
A small blue corner on a row number means that line is linked to your cost database.
A small green tick at the left of a money cell, with the number dotted-underlined, means records are behind that figure. Click the cell to see them — record number, party, amount — and click a row to open the record itself. Approved labor rolls up as one Labor row with its time entries nested underneath, and voided sources sit behind a Show voided toggle. It's on Budgeted Cost, Committed, Vendor Bills, Actual Cost, Approved Price, Invoiced, and Collected; purely derived columns like Remaining and Projected have no records of their own, so they don't open.

Where to go next

Build a budget — add groups, line items, and a cost code per line.
Margin, markup & profitability — set prices and read your profit columns.
Custom budget columns — add your own columns and formulas.