About budgeting labor, expense, and consultants
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When budgeting with Ajera, you work with labor, expense, and consultant amounts on the Manage tab of the Project Command Center in the following ways:
Activity type totals
To enter and track totals for labor, expense, and consultants, click
the
icon
in the Contract column to show these rows: Labor Total, Expense Total,
and Consultant Total. These totals are called activity type totals and
are available for the project and for phases.
The amount you enter for a project or phase automatically updates the
Labor Total. You can redistribute that total, as needed, by clicking the
icon and changing the amounts. If the contract amount of a phase is made
up of more than one activity type total, you cannot directly change the
amount; instead, you click the icon for the phase and make changes to its
activity type totals.
Resources
To enter and track a specific labor, expense, or consultant cost, add
a budget item for it, which is called a resource. Click the 
icon in the Description column for the project or phase, and click Add Labor, Add
Expense, or Add Consultant.
For example, you may add a Labor resource to identify and track the cost of a specific employee’s work on a phase.
If you enter a resource and a
contract amount for a Consultant or an Expense resource, Ajera can
track it as a commitment
to prevent overbilling from the vendor, if you have selected to track
budgets in 
> Setup >
Tasks
Because you use tasks to track the progress and scope of a project,
you budget hours for a task but not
cost amounts or rates. 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 updates cost amounts. To
add a task, click the 
icon to the right of the project, phase, or resource
where you want to add the task.
How activity type totals and resources work
The amounts in the Labor Total, Expense Total, and Consultant Total rows (activity type totals) interact with the rows you add for a Labor, Expense, or Consultant resource as follows:
Top-down budgets
Ajera assumes you are entering a top-down budget if you enter amounts for the project and upper phase levels before entering amounts for the lowest-level phases or resources. You may choose to do a top-down budget by entering a total, entering a percentage of that total for each phase and each resource, and then clicking the % icon to distribute the total to them.
|
Note: |
If you plan to distribute your totals down to resources, be sure the resources are not mixed in at the same level as any subphases. |
If you enter percentages for resources, Ajera updates the activity type totals based on the amounts distributed to each resource type.
If you do not enter percentages for resources,
you can still enter amounts for resources. However, these amounts do not
automatically update amounts for the phase and project. If the resource
totals do not sum to the upper levels of your budget, the 
icon appears. You can click the icon if you want to change the upper levels
to match the resources. To lock the upper levels
so that they are not accidentally updated from the resources, click the
unlocked lock
to lock it
.
Bottom-up budgets
Ajera assumes you are entering a bottom-up budget if you start entering amounts at the lowest levels of your budget before you enter amounts for the project and upper-level phases.
When preparing your budget from the bottom -up, you enter lower-level phase, resource hours and/or dollars, or labor task hours. These amounts update the project and any upper-level phases and also update activity type totals based on the type of resource entered.
