Your client or boss will often define successful project delivery by your overall cost performance and ability to meet project deadlines. As a result, your core responsibility as a project manager is to successfully execute a project within the estimated budget, time, and quality standards.
To achieve this, you need a project budget. Without a well-planned budget, projects can fall apart, or worse, abandoned. In fact, inaccurate cost estimates cause 28% of project failures.
At Mission Control, we pride ourselves on developing features that support project managers in their quest to deliver successful projects. One such feature is the Project Budgets. This feature allows you to break down your project costs into budget items so that you can track your project budget at a granular level across multiple budget line items.
What is the Project Budgets feature in Mission Control?
The Project Budgets feature in Mission Control allows you to track your budget at a granular level throughout the entire project lifecycle. It will enable you to break down your overall project budget into small manageable budget items.
For example, if you have a project that involves hosting an annual conference, you may break down your budget into four areas:
- Marketing
- Catering
- Preparations
- Resource planning
Whilst you have an overall ‘Project Budget’ field on the project, the budget items will make it easy to track your budget allocation and performance for each of these individual areas of your project.
With the Project Budgets feature, you can:
- Control costs at every phase of your project.
- Make instant changes once something goes wrong.
- Know the budget necessary to complete your project.
- Communicate to stakeholders and clients transparently.
To create new budget items, go to the Project Overview page and click on the ‘Budget’ Tab. Here you’ll see summary charts with a Data Table where you can view any existing budget items.
Within the Budget Tab, you’ll also see a series of Tabs that allow you to get to crucial information relating to your budget items, including:
- All
- Summary
- Scheduled
- Completed
- Forecast
- P&L
- GM%
- Variance
Click the ‘Manage Budgets’ button to create new or edit existing Budget Item records. For better cost tracking, you need to relate your Actions to your Budget Items, which can be done from the Create Actions page.
How to make the most of Project Budgets
The Project Budgets feature allows you to create a comprehensive, consistent, and reliable project budget so that you can manage your project budget successfully.
Within this feature, you can:
Make budget estimates
It’s vital to have a budget before you start running a project. The Project Budgets feature enables you to quickly create a project budget that you can use to communicate to stakeholders about how much money is needed and how teams will spend it. By breaking down your budget into budget items, stakeholders can clearly see how much each work element will cost, the cost of each level of the work breakdown schedule (WBS), and how much the total project will cost.
Track project budget with real-time data
When you record the estimated cost of each budget item, this data is stored within Mission Control, allowing you to track and manage every dollar in your budget with real-time data.
Put controls on spending
Once you create your budget items, you can quickly compare actual spending to the planned cost and audit expenses before reimbursement. If you find a significant variance between actual spending and the planned budget, you can implement control measures to reduce overspending. Doing so will protect your company from misuse of funds, buffer your project from budget overruns, and deliver more projects within set budgets.
Forecast future budget needs
You can quickly generate accurate reports on spending and related costs from your Project Budget dashboard and analyze these reports to gain insights on how to budget for future projects.
Conclusion
Creating a project budget allows you to link projects directly to your organizational goals. In doing so, you can track individual project budgets and whether the project is helping achieve your overall corporate objective.
While creating a budget is clearly crucial, it takes skill and experience to correctly forecast a project’s cost. Having project management software to support your efforts could make all the difference.
With our dedicated budgeting feature, project managers can use dashboards and charts to understand better how well projects are staying on budget and how that may impact the company’s overall budget.
If you need a tool that can help you create, manage and track your budget, then Contact us today to learn more about Mission Control’s Project Budgets feature.
