Budgeting bottom-up

When you budget bottom-up, you follow this general process:

  1. Enter amounts starting at the lowest level of your work breakdown structure: resources, subphases, phases, and finally project.
  2. Review project totals.

When you enter hours, Ajera calculates the contract amount based on the project's rate table or from average billing rates entered for the employee type or > Setup > Company > Preferences (if no rates are entered for the employee type). Ajera calculates the cost from the employee’s pay rate or from average cost rates entered for the employee type or > Setup > Company >Preferences (if no rates are entered for the employee type).

If your company sets up templates or uses Ajera’s industry-standard templates, your budget may already contain much of the structure and detail that you need.

Quick start with the Bottom-Up template

The quickest way to get started budgeting bottom-up is to use the standard Ajera template, Bottom-up. Because the contract amount for the project is based on the sum of the contract amounts for each resource and each phase, this template is already set up with several standard phases and several labor resources for each phase.

Building your budget

As you work with your budget, you may perform some or all of these tasks once or repeatedly, perhaps at different times. Here is a typical order for the way you may go about building a budget for the first time:

To

Do this

Open the project
  1. If you are not already working with the project, open it by clicking it in the project list at the top of window.
  2. Click the Manage tab.
  3. If you do not see the type of information you want to work with, select the detail you want to view.

Adjust work breakdown structure
  1. If needed, define the work breakdown structure of your project or make adjustments to it by working with the project tree.
  2. Add resources and add tasks to the project tree, where needed.
Note:

When using tasks, you continue to track project costs through resources and phases. However, you can choose to roll up task hours to resources or phases, which then does update cost amounts. See Change totals in this topic.

Enter detail
  1. For the first phase you want to budget, begin at the lowest level in the project tree for that phase and enter any or all of the following information:
  • Hours/units (if a labor resource has an employee or employee type assigned to it, the budgeted hours and dollars appear in Schedule Manager. You can use Schedule Manager to manage employee schedules by week as the project proceeds)
  • Contract amount (required for fee-based projects)
Note:

When you enter detail for a phase, Ajera uses the average cost and billing rates entered in > Setup > Company > Preferences to calculate hours, cost, and contract amounts based on your input for phase budgets.

When you enter a resource, Ajera uses the cost rates from either the employee type or the employee, and the billing rates from either the employee type, activity, or billing rate table.

More about entering hours and rates for resources

  1. Do the same thing until you have entered amounts for each level of the phase and then for all the phases of your project.

Show or hide activity types?
  1. Show or hide the amounts for activity types, as needed:
  • Click in the Contract column to show the activity type breakdown.
  • Click in the Contract column to hide it.

Change totals?
  1. Ajera does not automatically change hours/units, cost, or contract amount totals when you change lower-level amounts. In this way, you can control if and when certain totals change. Instead, when a total no longer equals the sum of its lower level amounts, Ajera displays a plus icon next to the name of the budget item for that total.

Depending on the goal for your budget, do one of the following:

  • Change your total so that it equals the sum of the lower levels by clicking the plus icon.
  • Adjust the lower-level items until they equal the total. When a total equals the sum of its lower levels, the plus icon disappears.

Recalculate cost or contract amounts?
  1. If you change cost or contract amounts that are based on a cost rate or billing rate, or if you later return to working on your budget and employee costs or billing rates have changed, the icon appears. Click it if you want to recalculate all cost and contract amounts for the entire project based on standard rates as set up in Ajera.

Make a budget final?
  1. If your budget is final and you no longer want to allow any changes to it, select the Final budget check box.

When a budget is final, you can no longer change amounts in the budget (unless your project security settings are set to allow changes to the Manage tab); however, you can change schedule and resource assignments. If you locked any contract amounts, they remain locked and cannot be unlocked until you undo the finalizing of the budget.

You can undo the finalizing of a budget only if you have security access to clear the Budget is final check box on the Project Info > Permissions subtab.

Save your work
  1. Click Save.