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Manage project budgets in Intuit Enterprise Suite

by Intuit• Updated 1 week ago

Project budgets streamlines and enhances how you manage project costs. We'll explain it's functionality, implementation, and benefits it brings to your project management processes.

Benefits of project budgets

Granular project financial tracking: Project budgets provide detailed breakdowns of estimated costs associated with a project. This let's you track expenses at a granular level, by product and service items. This insight helps with accurate financial management and control.
Separate internal and external financial views: Project budgets let you differentiate between internal cost management and customer facing financials. While project budgets track the internal expenses, use project estimates to generate estimates for clients. This ensures clarity and accuracy when communicating with clients without revealing detailed internal cost structures.
Improve accuracy and efficiency: Project budgets simplify cost estimation by reducing the need to juggle multiple apps and spreadsheets.

Access project budgets

You can access project budgets from multiple places, such as:

Directly from a project: Within a project, select + Add budget to start building your budget.
+ icon: The global + icon provides quick access to create a new budget from anywhere in the system.
Financial Planning: Go to Budgets (Take me there) to create and manage project budgets.
Project center: When you create a new project from Projects (Take me there) the center, you can also include a budget.

Create a project budget

You can create a project budget two ways:

Manual: Input your budget data manually, line by line.
Upload your spreadsheet: Upload your budget data from a spreadsheet. Our integrated AI system interprets data columns and lines, reducing manual effort and potential errors. Once the import is done, review all the matches and save the budget.

AI assisted import

Project budgets uses AI to streamline the import process:

Intelligent column mapping: The AI automatically identifies and maps columns from your spreadsheet to the appropriate fields in your budget, minimizing manual work.
Matching spreadsheet items to products and services: The AI auto-matches some items to save you time.

Frequently asked questions

I can't see project budgets in Intuit Enterprise Suite. How do I enable it?

Contact your customer success manager. They'll help you set project budgets up.

How are project budgets different from P&L and B/S company budgets?

Parameter	Project budgets	Company budgets
Scope and Focus	Specific to individual projects, detailing all project-related expenses.	Covers the entire organization's financial plan, including operational, marketing, and income expenses.
Audience	Project managers and execution teams.	Top management, finance teams, and other stakeholders.
Type	Based on products and services	Based on chart of accounts.

How are project budgets different from project cost estimates?

Category	Project estimates	Project budgets
Purpose and Use	Customer-facing transactions used to estimate and present costs, markups, and customer prices by item to the client. Helps you win projects by showing potential prices clearly and negotiably.	Internal tool used to estimate the overall costs required for a project based on accounts like labor, materials, and overhead. Crucial for internal management of expenses and financial planning. Not seen by end customers.
Scope	Includes high-level costs that are easy for customers to understand and negotiate. Details are often more summarized to avoid overwhelming clients or maintain negotiation flexibility.	Provides a detailed breakdown of all project-related expenses at a granular level, such as cost codes, specific tasks, and employee costs, ensuring accurate management and control of project finances.

How will my reports work with project budgets?

Budget values show up under “Estimated cost” in the following reports. Compare this against your actual cost values to see how much money you have left to spend to complete a project.

Estimates vs. Actuals by project
Work in progress by project
Committed cost by project
Cost to complete by project

Here are the data sources for every project report:

Estimated cost - Budget
Actual cost - Expenses
Estimated income - Project Estimate and Change Orders
Actual income - Invoices

Can I create a project budget against dimensions, custom fields, locations, and classes?

Yes, all of these fields are columns on the project budget.

Can I use project budgets if I use multicurrency?

No, you can't use project budgets if multicurrency is on.