To get the most out of Vision Project Control, you should establish budgets for your project's key components — including labor, expense, and overhead — and then periodically enter percent completes to reflect the projects’ current level of completion.
In this way you can monitor each project’s cost in relation to its overall progress. You can compare actual vs. budgeted amounts on the Project Progress Report, not only to determine whether or not a project is on target, but to understand the reasons why or why not.
Unless you are using Vision's Project Planning application, the tool that you use to enter all budgets and percent completes is the Project Budget Worksheet.
Project Budget Worksheet
The Project Budget Worksheet lets you experiment with different budgets before posting them to your database. Vision calculates new totals, percentages, and so on, based on the most recent data entered.
The Project Budget Worksheet is both a budgeting tool and a modeling tool. On the worksheet, you can:
-
Develop and manage labor and expense budgets for your projects. You can set up budgets for individual labor codes and expense accounts, at both cost and billing rates.
-
Run hypothetical budgeting scenarios. The worksheet lets you view the effect on the total budget and budgeted profit as you enter the budget or percent complete for each labor code and expense account. Analyzing the results of a "what-if" scenario lets you see if the project is meeting profit goals, before it is too late to make changes.
Budgets remain in effect until you enter new amounts that overwrite them.
We recommend that all project managers have access to the Project Budget Worksheet, so that they can review and update budgets for their own projects.