The Budget page is where you as the builder can go to see where your project stands financially at any point based upon what you planned to spend (original budget), what you're expecting to spend (revised budget – based upon client decisions and change orders/variations), what you've committed to spend through PO's to partners (committed) and what you've actually spent so far on the project (actuals).
Setting up your Budget
Your Budget is created through building your Estimate. On your Estimate you’re creating cost lines and tying your costs to the accounting code in which you plan to track this cost. While the Estimate and Specs & Selections pages present your budget details in a way that’s organized by item and cost lines, your Budget page will organize everything based upon the corresponding accounting codes.
The Budget Table
Your budget table in CoConstruct is organized by accounting code, letting you keep track of your projected and actual project costs for your various codes.
Original: The original budget numbers represent the anticipated costs for a project. It contains all of the budget details that were set up at the start of the project before your clients began making selections or upgrades. These numbers come from the costs you’ve entered in your Estimate that you used to create your contract price.
Revised: Over the course of the project, selections may be declined, upgrades may come through, and all of the financial implications of any changes to the scope of the project are reflected in the revised budget. These can reflect credits and overages.
Committed: Your committed costs will automatically populate from the purchase orders that you have created in CoConstruct. As soon as a purchase order has been released, you will see the committed cost tabulated on the budget to help give you the most complete picture of your project's financials.
Actuals: Once you start receiving bills/invoices for your expenses on the job, entering these "actuals" on the Budget page will give your team an idea of the projected cost to complete the job. For your open book projects, your clients are also able to see how these implicate changes to their Total Price of their project. These can be manually added or if you are linked to a QuickBooks, these can be automatically pulled in for you. Pulling budget actuals with QuickBooks
Complete: When you as the builder mark an accounting code as complete this is saying that you’ve paid out the final expense on that code.
Projected: This number uses the highest number between the revised budget, the committed cost, and the actuals to-date until your actuals are marked "Complete." Once the actuals have been marked "Complete," the projected total will match your actuals. Until that point, though, think of this as the most conservative estimate for how much you will spend on that accounting code or until the actuals exceed the expected cost of your revised budget amount.
Difference: This column will be updated when your committed cost and/or actuals exceed the revised budget amount automatically to show the overage amount. Otherwise, the difference will show $0 until you click the complete check box to confirm that you’ve finished spending money on this code. At this point, the budget will calculate the difference between your actuals and revised columns to show the under budgeted difference. This section is helpful in understanding where you may be constantly over or under budgeting costs on your projects to help you better estimate your next job.
In an open book project, these differences are returned or charged to the client whereas in a fixed price project these costs are removed or added to the builder’s profit.
A difference shown in RED indicates that you are over budget on that item. A difference shown in GREEN allows you to see where you've come in under-budget for completed costs.
Cost to Complete: As your committed costs and actuals are populated, this column will keep track of the remaining amount that you should be expecting to spend to fulfill the "projected total" amount.
Price/sq. ft: If you’ve entered the square footage of your project on the Estimate page, this column will calculate the price/sq foot for each accounting code. This allows you to gauge a common cost range for your estimates across projects and allow for better projections on future estimates.
% of Total: This column is calculating for each accounting code what percent of the total amount of your project is being spent where. This is helpful in seeing quickly if the majority of your cost let’s say is allocated to framing. If you have numbers that you could bring to your supplier about how much you build a year maybe you could work out a bargain to get some of the materials at a lower cost.
Profit: On fixed price projects, your profit will be simply the difference between your client’s “Total Price” and your cost at the bottom of the Budget page. This means that it will adjust based on your committed costs and actuals, so you’ll be able to view your estimated profit at any stage of the process, whether you’re comparing your original budget figures, your revised budget, committed or your actuals.
In an open book financial structure, your profit will be tracked on a set accounting code that you choose in your Markup/Margin Configuration on the Estimate page. As such your profit on the job should only be affected through selections, change orders and actuals, similar to your other costs. Rather than affecting your profit, differences in your expected costs and actuals will instead change the client’s projected project total.
You can also let CoConstruct's construction software automatically calculate profit and tax adjustments for you on the budget for open book projects. Doing this helps to make sure that as your costs and actuals adjust over the course of the job, your profit, tax, or contingency are automatically reflecting the best projected total. Auto-calculating profit and tax on budget for open book projects
