Reading your budget roll-ups

Every project budget rolls a line item's money up through the same set of columns. The same totals also feed your home dashboard tiles and the project's own summary, so once you can read them on the budget you can read them everywhere.

The money milestones

Read these left to right — they track a dollar from plan to bank:

1. Budgeted Cost — the cost your client actually agreed to on the line, from accepted client agreements. It is not your estimate: Extended Cost (Quantity × Unit Cost) is the estimate, and it lives back in the Estimating band. Until an agreement is accepted, Budgeted Cost displays a dash rather than $0.00, because nothing has been agreed yet.
2. Committed — dollars locked in through vendor orders, such as POs and subcontracts, against the line.
3. Actual Cost — cost incurred on the line: vendor bills approved for payment (whether or not you've paid them) plus approved labor cost. It's an accrual figure, so a bill counts from approval, not from payment.
4. Invoiced — the amount you've billed the client against the line so far.
5. Collected — client payments actually received against the line.

Profit and margin

The estimating band keeps your own working numbers; the profit band measures the job against the agreement the client actually signed.

• Profit — Extended Price minus Extended Cost: the planned profit dollars on a line, straight from your estimate.
• Margin % — that profit as a percent of price.
• Customer Order Profit — Approved Price minus Budgeted Cost: the profit the signed agreement promised. No value is calculated until an agreement is accepted.
• Budgeted Margin — Customer Order Profit as a percent of Approved Price: the margin the contract locked in.
• Projected Price — what the line is expected to bill in the end. With an accepted agreement, a fixed-price line uses Approved Price; a cost-plus line with a positive agreed cost uses the contract's price-to-cost ratio. While that cost-plus line remains open, its projection cannot fall below Approved Price; marking it Final lets an underrun reduce the projected price. Without an accepted agreement, fixed-price falls back to Invoiced and cost-plus to Projected Cost without an assumed fee.
• Projected Profit / Projected Margin % — Projected Price minus Projected Cost, and that profit as a percent of Projected Price: what you're actually tracking toward.
• Projected Profit Variance — Projected Profit minus Customer Order Profit: how much better or worse the line is landing than the agreement promised. On a cost-plus line with a positive agreed fee, an overrun can increase projected profit because the additional cost carries that fee; it does not mean the line is under budget.

At the company level these same names roll up across all projects — Budgeted Cost, Committed Cost, Actual Cost, Paid Cost, Invoiced, Collected, Profit, and a blended Margin % — which is exactly what the budget-metrics tiles on your home dashboards aggregate. Paid Cost is the vendor-bill payments you've actually made, tracked separately because Actual Cost accrues on approval; Accounts Payable is Billed Cost minus Paid Cost — the approved bills you haven't settled yet.

See the columns on a budget

1. Open Projects and choose a project, then open its Budget tab.
2. Each line shows these columns; group and section rows sum them. For how to turn columns on or off, see the Budget guides.

Use dashboard roll-ups

These roll-up totals are available on the budget, on the project summary, and as dashboard tiles you compose yourself. To build a profitability view across projects, use Project Metrics as the source for a chart or list tile on a home dashboard and group by project. Company Metrics provides organization-wide totals rather than per-project rows (see Home dashboards).