There is a new feature in Project 2007 that enables you to track budgets at the project level. This is a powerful new feature enabling you to track your cost forecast and (eventually) your actual cost against that original project budget. This article will explain how to set up a project budget.
The first thing that needs to be done is to determine the various ‘buckets’ of project budget you want to track. In this example, we will track Capital and Expense budgets. To do so, add those items as Resources on the Resource Sheet view as shown below. Indicate that the Resource is of Type ‘Cost’, and indicate a ‘Yes’ in the ‘Budget’ field. These two parameters indicate this is a Budget Cost resource.
Now that these Budget Cost resources are set up in the Resource Sheet view, assign them to the project. In order to do this, navigate to your Gantt Chart view. Make sure that the option “Show Project Summary Task’ is checked on the View tab under Tools, Options. This makes sure that a top-line project task appears on your project plan.
Once you have done this, place your cursor on that top line in the Gantt Chart, and use Tools, Assign Resources to assign those Budget Cost resources to that line item as follows:
Now that you have assigned the Budget Cost resources to the project, take the final step to actually allocate the budgeted cost itself. Intuitively, you should be able to do that through the step indicated above by just entering a value into the Cost field. However, it’s not that simple! The next step is somewhat tricky and hard to remember. What you need to do is navigate to the Task Usage view and expose the ‘Budget Cost’ column (in fact, if this is something you frequently do, you may consider creating a custom view that already has this column in it).
Once you have exposed this column, you can then enter the Budget Cost next to that resource line item as follows:
If you now navigate back to the Gantt Chart view, and expose the Budget Cost field, you will see the rolled up budget for this project.
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