Create and manage budgets

Resource Management helps you budget and track projects by time, fees, or expenses.

Who can use this?

Plans:

  • Resource Management

Permissions:

Resourcing Administrators

Find out if this capability is included in Smartsheet Regions or Smartsheet Gov.

Resourcing Administrators can create and manage budgets for an account.

All the budgets are in the Project Settings. To access them, go to the project you want to review and select Project Settings.

Time budgets

A time budget is the allocated labor for a project expressed in work hours or days. Your team's hours count against this budget.

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time, fee, and expense budget settings

Fee budgets

The fee budget is the labor allocated for this project, expressed in a fee amount. Your team's hours worked, multiplied by their bill rates, weigh against the budget.

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time, fee, and expense budget settings

Expense budgets

Expenses are non-labor-related project costs. Examples of expenses are costs incurred when hiring outside vendors, ordering prototypes, or travel costs. 

Use Expense categories to estimate costs at the beginning of the project and track incurred expenses for these categories. Examples of expense categories might include travel, materials, or consultants.

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time, fee, and expense budget settings

If project contractors or consultants bill your project a fixed fee for work performed, consider adding them as expenses rather than project labor. Estimate the fees and then enter their cost when you receive their invoices.

Budgeting expenses by category

Use categories to estimate and track specific expenses. You can use predefined categories or create your own. 

When you add a predefined expense category to your budget, a suggested cost appears for that category. For category items, you can use the suggested cost or use the calculator to set the cost for them.

For example, you can estimate travel expenses for a project using the expense tracking tool or budget the time you anticipate needing for marketing, billable tasks, or meetings using the fee or time tracker.