Build a project budget

Each budget line tracks three numbers: Budgeted (what you planned, plus any approved change orders), Committed (what you have promised in signed contracts), and Actual (what has actually been billed).

ON A PHONE each line starts folded: its name, what it has cost so far, and a chip saying how much is left or how far over it is. Tap the line for Budgeted, Committed, Actual and Variance, plus Details, Edit and Delete. Tap a category heading to fold the whole category away. Import Estimate, Use Template, Save as Template and Select are under the "..." button beside Add Line.

CLICK A LINE'S NAME to see what is behind the number: its contract, every bill against it, every change order and every receipt - each clickable through to where it lives. Anything not yet approved is listed greyed, with what it is waiting on, so you can see what is coming as well as what has landed. It is also where you set that line's markup.

ONE BILL CAN COVER SEVERAL LINES. A supplier invoice with lumber and windows on it, or a bill that is only partly this line - open the bill on Bills from subs and use "Split this across budget lines". A split does not have to add up to the invoice total; the remainder is shown as unassigned rather than sent somewhere you did not choose. It can never add up to MORE than the invoice. While a bill carries a split, the split is the whole story - it stops following its subcontract, so nothing is counted twice.

THE FIRST THING IT ASKS is how the job pays you - cost-plus, fixed price, or building to sell. That decides whether this screen tracks your markup or a contract value, and it is asked once. See "Track your profit on a job" for what each one does.

VARIANCE on a line is budget less whichever is bigger: what you have signed, or what you have already been billed. It is NOT committed minus actual - that is how much of the contract is still to be invoiced, which is a useful number but a different question, and it is on the hover instead. Variance answers "is this line going to beat or blow its budget", so a line with a signed contract it has not billed against yet is already spoken for.

LEFT TO SPEND counts your signed contracts, not only the invoices that have arrived. If you budgeted $500,000, have signed $450,000 in contracts, and have been billed $200,000, you do not have $300,000 left - you have $50,000. The tile used to show the larger number. The Committed tile now also says how much of it is signed but not yet billed, which is the money that used to hide.

THE TILES NOW SHOW THEIR OWN WORKING. Actual Spent prints its split underneath, because THREE different things add into it and the screen only ever showed the total: bills from subs, an Actual typed straight onto a line that has no subcontract, and material receipts assigned to a line. If it looks bigger than your Bills tab, that tab is usually filtered to one status: Actual Spent counts every bill that is approved, released for payment, OR paid. Left to spend now prints the subtraction it actually did, rather than a total you have to reverse-engineer.

DOES YOUR FEE APPLY TO MATERIALS? That depends on your contract, so it is a setting per job - the "Charge this on materials too" tick next to the markup rate. It is OFF unless you turn it on, which is how every job worked before the setting existed, so nothing you have already earned changed. With it on, each receipt can still be overridden: open a receipt on the Materials tab and mark it at cost. The fee line on the Budget tab always names what it was earned on, so the number and the sentence beside it can never describe different money.

APPROVED CHANGE ORDERS RAISE THE LINE. Approve a change order and the budget line it belongs to grows by that amount, so a line does not read as over budget at the very moment the overage was approved and funded. The line shows "incl. $X CO" underneath, and the Total Budget tile breaks out original versus approved changes. Your original estimate is never overwritten - it is still there, which is what you want when asking how well the job was estimated.

1. 1Open the project and go to the Budget tab.
2. 2Add a line: cost type (hard or soft), category, description, and budgeted amount.
3. 3Pick a Space for the line - Interior or Exterior - to have it roll into that breakdown (leave it unassigned if it doesn't apply).
4. 4Optionally link the line to a subcontract - then Committed and Actual fill in automatically from that sub's contract and approved invoices.

The category list covers the trades in roughly build order - site prep, excavation, waterproofing, foundation, framing, trusses, craning, roofing, gutters, decking, low voltage, fire sprinklers, soundproofing, finishes, rubbish removal, and so on. It is a long list, so type in the search box at the top of the dropdown to jump to one.

Call a trade something else? Click "+ Use my own category" under the Category box and type your own. It saves on the line like any other category, and once you have used it, it appears in the dropdown on every other job - so you only ever type it once.

If the project has Interior/Exterior square footage set (from New Project or the Projects list edit), the Budget tab shows an Interior total, Exterior total, cost-per-square-foot for each, and a grand total - so you can see your cost per sq ft at a glance.

Already have the budget in a spreadsheet? Use Import Estimate in the header (.xlsx/.csv). It reads amounts written any normal way - $24,000.00, 24,000, plain numbers, or a CSV where everything is text - and takes the line TOTAL rather than the unit price. A leading cost-code column stays a cost code instead of becoming the line-item name.

Before anything is added it tells you how many lines it found and how many of them it could read an amount for, so a sheet it could not price is obvious straight away rather than after the fact. Tick "Bring the amounts in too" to keep the prices, or untick it to import just the line items and price them yourself.

Then "Add these lines to this budget" puts them straight on the job. If some rows match lines already there you get a choice - update those with the sheet's amounts, or skip them and add only the new rows. Neither option deletes anything; lines not in the sheet are left alone. There is also a smaller link to save the sheet as a reusable template at the same time, for a set of lines you use on every job.

Loaded the wrong template or made a mess? Check the box next to any line (or the header checkbox to select a whole category or everything visible), then click Delete - you'll be asked to confirm before anything is removed.