About the Project Budget

A project budget keeps track of the costs and benefits for a project.

The project owner, Project Lead, or Financial Reviewer can create a project budget to help keep track of the costs and benefits for the project. Only one budget can be created per project.

A project budget can contain cost items as individual account ledgers. The cost items required for the budget are selected per project. The sum of all the cost items is the total cost.

An understanding of how the currency exchange rate works is also helpful in working with budgets.

This page discusses:

Project Cost Examples
Currency Exchange Rate in a Budget

Project Cost Examples

Projects have plan, estimated, and actual costs. Projects consist of cost categories with intervals.

Below is an example of project costs that are planned, estimates, and actual.


	Plan	Estimate	Actual
Project Cost	$400,000	$300,000	$290,000

Project Cost Item List

The table below shows an example of predefined financial cost categories selected for a project. The planned, estimated, and actual costs are tracked for each cost category.


	Plan	Estimate	Actual
Travel & Living	$100,000	$100,000	$90,000
Computer Equipment	$500,000	$500,000	$700,000
Program Expense	$50,000	$70,000	$65,000
Supplies and Tooling	$20,000	$50,000	$30,000

Cost Item Interval Data

An interval is defined for all cost categories: weekly, quarterly, or monthly. Based on the selected interval and the budget duration, data is entered for each period and for each item. In the example below, the cost category interval selection is monthly and the duration is 6 months. Each column is a single "cost item data" that tracks the planned, estimated, and actual costs for each period.


Compensation & Benefits - Cost Category
	Jan	Feb	March	April	May	June	Total
Plan	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000	6000
Estimate	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000	6000
Actual	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000	6000

Currency Exchange Rate in a Budget

An important concept is how currency exchange rates are used in budgets.

On premises only: In emxSystem.properties, the value for Triangulation currency is defined in the property emxProgramCentral.Currency.Triangulation.

If the value for Triangulation = None, then you must define both currency exchange values. For adding a currency exchange rate refer to Collaboration and Approvals: Adding an Exchange Rate. If you want to define the currency exchange from Dollar to Euro, you must define the currency exchange rate from both Dollar to Euro and from Euro to Dollar. For example, if the currency exchange rate for Dollar to Euro = 0.877, then the currency exchange rate for Euro to Dollar must be = 1/0.877 = 1.1402508551881. For an exact conversion, you must define the currency exchange value up to 15 decimal points. If you round off the exchange rate to 1.14 there will be fractional loss in the values for Budget, for example, a user-entered value of 1000 will display as 999.78.
If the value for Triangulation = Dollar (or any specific currency), then you need to only define one exchange rate. For example, if you want to define the currency exchange from Dollar to Euro then you only need to define the currency exchange rate from Dollar to Euro. For example, the currency exchange rate for Dollar to Euro = 0.877.