Job settings: Budgets

In order to evaluate a job, it is important to know its budget framework and which services have already been incurred within that framework.

We distinguish between three budgets:

The total budget

It defines how much revenue this job is expected to generate, regardless of whether parts of that revenue must be passed on to external contractors and suppliers.

It can be defined by the sum of all approved estimates (default setting) or by planned budgets. Planned revenue budgets can be created in the job under the "Projektplanung" tab > "Forecast" - e.g. when there is no estimate at all.

There are cases in which more revenue was achieved than was defined in the estimate or in planned budgets. In such cases, it can be set on the job whether the total budget framework of the job should continue to be based on the planned value or on the realized (higher) revenue.

The agency service budget

A job's agency service budget specifies how much service the team is allowed to deploy for the job.

These services can either be defined by a job's estimates (default setting), or by planned budgets for agency services. Planned budgets can be defined either on an estimate line item in the "Planned Budgets" tab or in the "Budget Planning" > "Forecast" tab of an estimate or in the "Projektplanung" > "Forecast" tab of a job - e.g. when there is no estimate at all or the estimate values are not realistic.

In the right column we have the option to configure whether we want to use the customer price list of a job as the metric for incurred agency service, or the internal employee cost rate defined in each user's employment relationship, Internal employee cost rate. The job result can differ significantly depending on the selection and setting.

More about employment relationships and internal employee cost rate can be found here:

Edit users

The external service budget

Also for the budget framework of external services, it can be set in the left column whether it is derived from the sum of the external service items defined in approved estimates or from planned external service budgets.

For example, I can quote the customer printing costs of 500 EUR, the printer gave me an offer of 350 EUR, so I might decide here to set the planned budget for agency services to 350 EUR. If I later receive an invoice from the printer for 380 EUR, however, the job's external service budget will be exceeded.

In the right column I can set whether the value of the incurred external services corresponds to the respective purchase value (default setting), i.e. in our example 380 EUR, or to the sales value (500 EUR).