Project costing in the budget

Client agreements, vendor orders and bills linked to budget lines feed your Budget automatically. The result is live project costing: for each budget line you can see what the client agreed to, what you've committed to vendors, and what you've actually incurred — no separate spreadsheet or double entry. A cost code alone does not identify which budget row receives an amount.

Where the numbers come from

Three things drive the costing columns, and all three are why cost-coding each line matters:

• Accepted client agreements set Budgeted Cost — the cost the client agreed to on that line. Until one is accepted, Budgeted Cost has no agreed value and displays a dash, not $0.00: there is no budget to measure against yet.
• Accepted vendor orders add to the Committed column on the budget lines they reference.
• Vendor bills approved for payment add to Vendor Bills and to Actual Cost. Actual Cost is an accrual figure: a bill counts from the moment you approve it for payment, whether or not you've paid it. Approved labor cost lands in Actual Cost too, alongside the bills.

If a line on an order or bill isn't linked to a budget line, its money still counts on the record — it just won't roll up against a specific budget row.

Bidding feeds this pipeline too: the Bid Requests column (estimating band) shows the low–high range of the vendor quotes received on each line (or "N pending" while quotes are outstanding). Click the cell to see every vendor's bid — status dot, vendor, BID number, amount — where you can click Use cost to write a quoted unit cost into the line's Unit Cost, or click a bid to open its bid request and Award it. Awarding mints a draft Purchase Order with the winning prices, and once that vendor order is accepted the amounts land in Committed like any other vendor order.

Read the costing columns

Open the project's Budget and look across a line. The project-costing columns include:

1. Budgeted Cost — the agreed cost from accepted client agreements on this line. No value is agreed until one is accepted.
2. Committed — total of accepted vendor orders against this line.
3. Committed Budget Remaining — Budgeted Cost minus Committed; how much of the agreed budget you haven't yet promised to a vendor. No value is calculated without an agreed Budgeted Cost.
4. Vendor Bills — bills approved for payment against this line, whether or not they've been paid.
5. Actual Cost — cost incurred: vendor bills approved for payment (paid or not) plus approved labor cost.
6. Actual Budget Remaining — Budgeted Cost minus Actual Cost. No value is calculated without an agreed Budgeted Cost.
7. Projected Cost — the expected final cost: the greatest of Budgeted, Committed and Actual Cost, or simply Actual Cost once you tick Final on the line.
8. Cost to Complete — Projected Cost minus Actual Cost, never below zero; what you still expect to pay out.
9. Projected Budget Remaining — Budgeted Cost minus Projected Cost: projected under (positive) or over (negative). No value is calculated without an agreed Budgeted Cost.

Approved time entries roll up here too: Hours and Time Cost sit in the same costing band, so labor lands beside vendor spend — and Time Cost is one of the two halves of Actual Cost.

How the colors read

Vendor Bills, Time Cost and Actual Cost each compare their own value against Budgeted Cost, and the two directions are gated differently:

• Red the moment that one column alone goes over Budgeted Cost — whether or not the line is finished, because further spend can only make it worse.
• Green only once you tick Final on the line. A column still accruing under budget isn't good news yet; it just hasn't finished.
• No verdict at all while Budgeted Cost is blank or zero — there's no agreed budget to judge against.

Projected Cost is never gated: it reads green under Budgeted Cost and red over it from day one, because a projection is a forecast.

Keep project costing accurate

• Always cost-code your lines. Pulling order and bill lines from the budget keeps each one linked to the right budget row and cost code.
• Acceptance, not drafting, commits. A draft or sent order shows nothing in Committed — only an Accepted order does. The same is true of a client agreement and Budgeted Cost.
• Approval, not payment, is actual. Approving a bill for payment is what moves it into Vendor Bills and Actual Cost; recording the payment settles it and doesn't move those columns again. Sending a bill to the vendor is delivery only and commits nothing.
• Voiding reverses it. Voiding an accepted order or an approved bill backs its amount out of the budget. Deleting a record does so too when deletion is allowed; an order with a recipient signature cannot be deleted.