The Importance of a Milestone Budget in Join
Having a budget in Join will make your Dashboard view more meaningful
Sometimes you may not have a budget to work with, but it’s still important that you define a target value to ensure you’re getting all the benefits out of Join. Once a budget is added, your Dashboards, Milestone Reports, Variance Reports, and more become significantly more informative and actionable.
What is a Budget?
A Budget in Join is the target value for the project and acts as the goal for the team to work towards. Different teams may use different terms for a budget. If your team uses a different term, you can customize Join's terminology via the Settings page — see How to Change Join Terminology for details. Adding a Budget into Join is just like importing an Estimate.
Three Types of Budgets
Lump Sum Budget
The easiest way to create a budget is a single line item lump sum number, which can be entered in seconds. A lump sum will give you the Budget line on the Dashboard Cost Trendline but will lack any Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) filtering, grouping, and reporting in the Dashboard graphs and various reports. Here's a step-by-step guide to Creating a Lump Sum Budget.
Pro-rata Budget
If you know the project's lump sum budget amount and your estimate is broken out by WBS, you can prorate the line items from your estimate to match the lump sum total. A pro-rata budget allows you to see the proportional comparison between the current cost and a budget equivalent. It also serves as a starting point that can be refined collaboratively with the Owner to reflect the true target budget. Here's a step-by-step guide to Prorating a Budget from an existing Estimate.Full Detailed Budget
A fully detailed budget broken out by WBS is the recommended approach. By assigning target values to each WBS code, the team can develop cost Items focused on the specific scopes that require cost reduction, enabling more precise project cost management.
Regardless of the type of budget you choose, Join makes it easy to work collaboratively with the Owner to ensure the budget is clearly defined for the team to complete the project successfully.