Ruddr offers two distinct types of budget options: an overall budget and a monthly budget. An overall budget is the budget for the entire project while the monthly budget establishes a financial baseline for each month. In order to set up a budget, you must have access to the project and also have the Edit project permission set on your security role. A budget allows you to plan out the hours, revenue, expenses, and other billable items that you expect over the course of the entire project or for each month of the project. You can break the hours and expenses out into their billable and non-billable components. Additionally, when you a Target Services Gross Margin on the Financial Budget Summary, Ruddr will calculate additional cost, profit, and margin budgets based on this desired services gross margin for the project. Setting up a budget at the outset of a project is a highly-recommended best practice. Once your budget is created, you can monitor your performance against the budget from the project dashboard. For visibility into a project’s budget, a project’s Project Admins and the Client Relationship Owner of the associated client can be notified via email when the project hits or exceeds a specified percentage of the project’s hours and / or services revenue budget. This is accomplished through budget notification settings on the project’s Budget tab.Documentation Index
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Create an Overall Budget
To turn an overall budget on for your project, simply click the Track overall budget checkbox within the Settings section (Figure 1) of the Overview tab of the Edit Project drawer.
Summary Budget
The quickest and simplest way to create a budget is to use a summary budget (Figure 2). A summary budget allows you to type in planned overall figures for services revenue, billable hours, non-billable hours, billable expenses, non-billable expenses, and other items (such as products).
Detailed Budget
Choosing the standard, detailed budget allows you to provide more granular data than the summary budget option.Hours and Services Revenue
For each role or member on the project team, you specify the number of planned billable hours and non-billable hours (Figure 3). For time and materials projects, the budget revenue is automatically calculated per role/person and included in the summation of hours and services revenue for the project.
Expenses
For the expense budget (Figure 4), you click the + Quick Add button to add a new expense category to the expense budget. For each row in the budget, provide the total planned billable and non-billable expense dollar amounts for the expense category. Workspace Admins have the ability to add, edit, and remove expense categories from the workspace settings area.
Other Items
In addition to budgeting for hours, revenue, and expenses, you can also budget for Other Items (Figure 5). Other items are often products or materials that you sell to your customers alongside the delivery of your services project. If your company buys products (such as software licenses) wholesale and then resells those products to clients, you would budget for those items in this section.
Detailed Budget from Aggregated Tasks
When a detailed budget is aggregated from the project’s tasks, this means that the billable and non-billable hours per role are automatically calculated from the set of tasks defined on the Tasks tab of the project dashboard. This can be thought of as a “bottoms up” budget in which you define the work at a task level and the budget builds itself. When using the aggregated budget option, it is imperative that all project work be captured within a task. If there is project work not reflected in a task, the aggregated budget figures will be lower than they should be. With an aggregated budget, the expense and other items budget areas on the Budget tab remain and are available just as they are when creating a detailed budget. When a task does not have member / role assignments, the task’s hours budget or services revenue budget is included as part of a “Unassigned” role budget on the project budget. This ensures that all budgets for tasks are represented on the project’s Hours and Services Revenue budget (Figure 6).
Financial Budget Summary
As you build your project budget, the total revenue budget (Figure 7) will be calculated from the services, expenses, and other items totals that you specify, and will be displayed as part of the Financial Budget Summary (Figure 7). For Fixed Fee projects, you will want to ensure that your Fixed Fee Billing Schedule equals the total billable budget represented here.
Target Services Gross Margin
In addition to tracking a total revenue budget, Ruddr will calculate cost, profit, and margin budgets, all of which can be tracked in addition to revenue. In order for Ruddr to calculate and provide these budgets, you will need to provide a Target Services Gross Margin value in the Financial Budget Summary (Figure 8).
- Labor Cost
- Services Gross Profit
- Total Cost
- Total Gross Profit
- Total Gross Margin
Monthly Budget
A monthly budget is useful when you need to manage a project to a certain amount of time, expenses, and fees per month. You can use both an overall budget and a monthly budget on the same project. To turn on the monthly budget, check the Track monthly budget checkbox in the Settings section (Figure 9) of the Edit Project drawer.
Project Budget Notifications
When setting the project budget, you can specify whether or not you would like to send out project budget notifications via email. These notifications can be sent for the hours budget, the revenue budget, or both. When the project budget notifications are enabled, the project’s Project Admin and the Client Relationship Manager for the respective client will be notified via email (Figure 12) when the project hits or exceeds the specified budget percentage denoted when the setting is enabled. Additionally, a follow-up notifications will be sent to both parties when the budget hits or exceeds 100%. Each budget option - Summary, Detailed, Detailed Aggregated from Tasks - will have options (Figure 11) for setting up project budget notifications. When enabled, you can also specify the percentage at which you wish for the notifications to be sent.
