Hi,
I will try to explain how to put the Budget in your Project with MS PROJECT 2010. I will repeat part of my Post from 13.10.2011!
First of all, when you have a Budget Resource, make sure that you put the different name convention to that resource (use UPER CASE, or prefix like B-). Let say that we have three budgeted Resources for our Project:
Do not forget that if you want to make a Resource as a Budgeted Resource you must double click on the Resource and fill the check mark:
Now I will ad few Tasks on my Project:
Now I want to assign Budgeted Resource to the Project. Those resources can be assigned only to the Project Summary Task, so I have to turn it on:
Now, I will assign all Budgeted Resources to this Task:
Now what??? Firs I will apply the Task Usage View!
Now, I will add two new fields: Budgeted Cost, and Budgeted Work:
and I will get:
For Work Resources, I can put the Budgeted value for Budgeted Resources in hours/days/weeks etc. For Material Resources, I can put Budgeted value in Pieces, Gallons etc. and for the Cost Resources in money!
But what if you want to designate Budget within a specific period of time? You should use Resource Usage view:
I will add two new rows on the right side of this View:
and I will get:
Now I can put those Budgeted Values on a day by day (or week by week, etc.) basis:
In my next post, I will explain how to make your own budget for each Task, and how to control it, because this kind of budgeting is not good enough (from my point of view).
Regards,
Nenad Trajkovski 
Great blog and helpful post – thanks!
However, what is the use of setting up these budget resources – how do the “budget” fields compare against baseline fields – why would I want to use these fields instead of the more granular baseline fields?
It depends of your needs!
Some Project Managers are Using:
1. Budget field: How much we budgeted for the Task
2. Baseline: How much we planned when we find out what exactly do we have to do (with whome and how long)
3. Actual: How much did we spend!
If the budget is equal to Baseline you do not need those fields!
Regards
Maybe I can answer that question for you, Nenad, so that Kevin doesn’t get the wrong idea!
The idea of budget resources and assigning them to the Project Summary Task is so that you can produce an overall budget without having to work through all of the detail of the resources assigned to each individual task.
Experienced project managers sometimes want or need to come up with an overall budget before they have all of the detail of their projects. Sometimes this is because they need to not only justify the project to management but they may need to get approval for the budget. Using budget resources they can present a breakdown of costs at a high level without assigning resources to what may be thousands of tasks and resources.
Once they have used this approach, some project managers later go into detail and some do not.
On many projects MS Project is only used for planning and for getting approval, etc. Once this is done, the project manager doesn’t use MS Project for tracking of costs or anything else!
Of course, most do use MS Project throughout the project, and they will often find it useful to compare any baseline (which has the detailed breakdown, of course) they produce with their original budget (high level, in the Project Summary Tasks) costs, Budget and baseline are very different things, although of course you can have baseline budget costs and baseline budget work!, Later – as the project progresses – the project manager may compare these overall budget figures with the baseline(s) and then the actuals. Management almost certainly will!
So, for example, the project manager will be able to use budget resources like this. “In the project our costs overall for materials will be $X. The overall work will be Y days for internal resources and Z hours for external resources.” And so on… the budget has no breakdown by task.
However, if and when the project manager does assign resources to individual tasks (most will!), also includes costs and then sets one or more baselines, the baseline totals can be compared with the overall budget he or she started with.
Further, if the project manager then does tracking of actual work and costs, it will also be possible to compare totals for actuals with the budget and the details of the actuals with the details of the baseline(s).
It’s important to remember that not everybody uses or needs to use MS Project in the same way, but that experienced project managers and users of MS Project will understand when and how to use budget resources!
Regards
Toby
I agree. But in complex Project(s), more detailed budget is more needed, and important. But yes, you can use MS Project and budgetede Resources as you described.
Thank you so mucH