Budget and time
A projectProjectA job seen as a whole in project planning: a body of work with a budget, a team, dependencies and a deadline. Its tasks are still planned as ordinary appointments on the board. is given an amount of work it is allowed to consume, and the question throughout its life is how much of that is left. The Time tab answers it.
The burndown
The budget burndown plots three lines over the life of the project:
| Line | What it is |
|---|---|
| Planned | What the plan says should have been consumed by now |
| Actual | What has actually been recorded |
| Remaining | What is left of the budget |
The comparison is the point. A project at 60% of budget is entirely healthy in month five and alarming in month two, and only plotting them together makes that difference visible.
A project where nothing has been recorded yet has no burndown to draw, and says so. The chart starts once the first budget entryBudget entryA record of budget consumed by a task over a range of days, kept in an append-only ledger. A correction is a new entry that cancels an earlier one, so the history stays auditable. exists.
Work recorded outside the planned window, before the project was meant to start or after it was meant to finish, cannot be plotted against a timeline it falls outside. Those periods are listed separately with their own dates rather than being dropped or quietly folded into the nearest point.
Budget by task breaks the same figures down per task, which is where an overrun becomes attributable to something specific rather than to the project in general.
Recording what was used
Budget is recorded per taskTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource., over a range of days.
The important property is that the ledger is append-only: entries are never edited. A correction is a second entry that cancels the first, and the tab offers to record that canceling entry for you.
This is deliberate, and worth understanding rather than working around. An editable figure tells you only what somebody currently believes was used. A ledger tells you what was recorded, when, and what was subsequently corrected, which is the difference between a number and an audit trail. A negative entry gives budget back, so corrections and genuine returns use the same mechanism.
Each entry carries where it came from:
| Source | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Manual | Somebody recorded it here |
| External | It arrived from another system |
| Unknown | The source was not recorded |
For a project where many tasks need recording at once, budget can be entered for every task in one sheet rather than one task at a time. Budget can also be updated from tracked time, which takes what was actually logged against the tasks and records it rather than asking somebody to retype it.
Budget used is not progress
Recording that a task consumed eight hours says nothing about how far through it you are. A task can burn its entire budget and be half finished, and that combination is precisely the one worth catching early.
Progress is reported separately. See progress and attention.
Changing the budget
A project's budget is not always fixed for its lifetime. Additional budget can be granted, which the ledger records as a scope change rather than silently raising the original figure, so the burndown keeps showing both what was originally allocated and what the project was later given.
Related
- Timesheets - the hours logged across all resources, which is where tracked time comes from.
- Time registration API - pushing logged time from another system.