Project Budget Template

This template allows you to track your project’s spending to current and original plan by phase and by month within the phase.  The Excel workbook is broken into 3 worksheets - INSTRUCTIONS (this tab), DASHBOARD, AND BUDGET.   The DASHBOARD worksheet is meant to give you an overview of your project budget by phase (for up to 5 project phases) and the total project expenses.  Under “Current Phase Dates” on the DASHBOARD worksheet, enter the project team start date and the completion date of each of the 4 phases.  If your project has more than 4 phases, you can combine the phases.  If you decided to modify the worksheet to include more (or less phases), please be aware that you are doing so at your own risk.  You can easily submit your budget as a report and add some high level detail to the “Project Budget Comments” section, describing any changes to your budget or spending patterns. The BUDGET worksheet is broken down into 3 categories of expenses - General Expenses, Capital Expenses, and Labor Expenses.  You can easily modify the descriptions of each (in blue text) to reflect your organization/project accounts and labor force. Based on the Project start and Phase Completion dates you added on the DASHBOARD sheet, the BUDGET sheet should automatically populate with the appropriate monthly columns in each phase.  Under each month, simply enter the actual amount spent per account or resource.  Note that resources are listed by hour rather than by dollar.  There is a cell on the BUDGET sheet (near the bottom of the “B” column) that allows you to enter a set estimated labor rate.  This template does not allow you to enter individual resource labor rates (maybe the next revision). For each phase, there is a column called PHASE ACTUALS that automatically totals all the monthly expenses across the phase.  There is a similar column on the far right side of the spreadsheet for the PROJECT ACTUALS that totals all phase actuals. Likewise there is a column in each phase called PHASE CURRENT PLAN, where you can manually enter your current estimates for each account / resource by phase.  Also, there is a column in each phase called PHASE CONTRACT, where you put your original contracted estimations.  This allows you to compare your current actuals to your current plan and original plan estimates.  These columns are also totaled automatically at the far right side of the worksheet. Note that there are grouping buttons (the little plus/minus buttons) at the top and the left side of the BUDGET worksheet.  This allows you to expand or contract detail.  Note that the graphs on the DASHBOARD sheet will only appear if the groupings are fully expanded (visible). Once you have filled in the actual, planned, and original data into the BUDGET spreadsheet, you should see graphs appear on the DASHBOARD worksheet.  The blue line in each phase chart represents a linear “burn rate” for the phase.  In otherwords, it looks at the total amount you plan on spending per phase (that you entered under the PHASE PLANNED columns for each phase on the BUDGET worksheet) and divides the amount equally over each month in the phase.  This gives you a yardstick to compare your actual Expense, Capital, and Labor expenses against.

Project Budget Template

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