Budget realization
Budget realization is a sub-tab of a project's Financials, beside Initial budget, Plan vs Actual, Team costs over time and Related costs. It answers one question: for each line you planned, how much has been committed in contracts, and how much of that has been invoiced?
It needs an initial budget to compare against. Until the project has one, the tab says so and points you at the Initial budget sub-tab.
How the table is organised
The table has one row per tag. Tags are what tie a budget line to the contracts and invoices that spend against it, so the tags on your initial budget are the rows you see here.
Each row shows:
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Tag | The budget tag the row is about. |
| Budget realization | Two bars. The lighter one is the share of the plan your contracts already cover; the darker one is the share that has been invoiced. |
| Planned (net) | What the initial budget set aside for this tag. |
| Contracted (net) | The net value of the project's contracts allocated to this tag. |
| Invoiced (net) | What has actually been invoiced against it. |
An orange tail on the bar marks an overrun — contracted value has passed the plan. It is worth checking whether the contract is wrong or the budget needs updating.
A Total row counts each contract and each invoice once, even when it is coded on more than one tag. That is why the Total is usually smaller than the columns above it add up to: an invoice split across two tags appears in both rows, because seeing it under each one is the point of the breakdown — but it is one invoice, and the Total says so. Use the search field to narrow to one tag and the Total narrows with it, still counting each document once. Select a row to expand the contracts behind it without leaving the tab. A tag showing zero contracts is in the plan but has nothing linked to it yet.
If any invoice has no net amount recorded, a line under the Total says how many were left out of the invoiced figure — the total is of what could be counted, and it tells you when that is not everything.
Contracts without a tag
The table shows budgeted tags only. A contract that carries no tag has no row to belong to, so it is left out of the table and out of the Total.
When that happens the tab says so, above the table: how many contracts were left out and what they are worth together. A project whose contracts are all untagged would otherwise read exactly like a project with no contracts at all — every figure zero, no row, nothing on screen to distinguish the two.
The contracts themselves are not hidden anywhere else. To see them, open Related costs, which lists what has actually hit the project regardless of tagging.
To bring an untagged contract into this table, give it a tag that the initial budget uses. Tagging it against a tag the budget does not carry still leaves it out, because there is no planned line for it to be compared with.
Example use cases
- A project manager checks halfway through a build which budget lines are already fully committed in contracts, and which still have room.
- A controller spots an orange overrun tail on one tag, opens the row, and finds the contract that pushed it past the plan.
- Someone reading a project whose figures are all zero sees the notice above the table, learns that eight contracts are untagged, and tags them so the comparison becomes meaningful.
- A finance lead reconciles contracted against invoiced value per tag to see how much of the committed spend has actually been billed.