If you’re looking at tracking a project, tasks, and goals, understanding the project’s budget is usually top of mind. If you don’t have a tool that you use for this on the regular, or just want a tool that is more in-tune with your actual project management, Hive could be a great option.
Why? We make things easy. Budgeting in Hive can be broken down in a few ways. The simplest would be project budgets.
Budgeting by Project
At its simplest, budgets in Hive can be added by project. This allows you to have an allocated budget easily identifiable in your project overview page, which can be accessed in each project by clicking “Overview.”
Once you’re on the overview page, scroll down to your budget section, which will have a few important areas. First, you’ll see an “Add budget” button. To add your set budget, click there.
Once you’ve added the set budget, for this example I added $1 million, you can describe the budget itself and give some additional context.
You’ll be able to add the following into the budget listing:
Name
Type
Rate (fixed or recurring)
Category
Date
General description
The good news is that you can add more than one budget into this overview, if you have, for example, multiple budgets associated with different categories.
Adding “Other Costs”
If you’ve got additional costs that you want to flag as separate from the budget, you can do that by clicking “Other costs,” and adding in the additional costs you’ve identified. Once you add those, your budget overview will have a few additional elements.
Tracking Time Against Budget
Another very popular use of budgeting in Hive is to track time in timesheets against your overall project budget, so you can ensure you’re staying within the confines of your maximum spend.
It’s easy to get started with the time tracking component, but there are a couple important prerequisites.
Turn on Resourcing and Timesheets in Hive Apps.
Enter a Bill Rate for each individual who will be entering time against the project. You can do this from the Resourcing tab, by clicking on each person’s name to open their profile. Bill rate is at the bottom as shown here:
P.S: Note that you can also retroactively update user bill rates if you need to edit or correct any past resourcing bill rates. You can add a date range to override the bill rate for, as well as override custom project bill rates. You can also click on the “Show history” section to see the full history of all changes made that user’s bill rate.
Once you begin adding time, you’ll then start to see the time tracking come out of the budget identified in project overview. You’ll see the total budget, unused budget, and billed amount from timesheets.
If you want to view your time tracked and billable hours directly in the Timesheets app, just click “View in Timesheets” in the upper right hand corner.
Viewing and Reporting on Budgets
If you’re interested in viewing multiple budgets at once and reporting on budget progress, you can easily do that with a Portfolio View.
Portfolio View
A Portfolio View allows you to identify high-level information about multiple projects across your workspace, and you can add columns for Billed Amount, Budget, and Remaining Budget.
These columns can also be edited and filtered based on the level of information you want, but are great for quickly digesting where project budgets stand.
Dashboards Reporting
If you’re looking for a more visual representation of billing reporting, check out our Dashboards app, which allows you to create data visualizations for:
Estimated time
Estimated billed time
Time tracking hours
Timesheet hours
Resourcing estimates
Estimated cost
Time tracking cost
Estimated billed
Time Tracking billed
You can also group these items by project, user, or custom field. The widget can be further filtered by date of time logged, action due dates, or project due dates.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to pay for time tracking, timesheets, and billing? – Time tracking is included in Hive Teams, but timesheets and resourcing are both add-ons. More on our add-on pricing here.
Can I add a budget without paying for an add-on? – Yes! Budgets can be added in any version of Hive and do not require Hive Teams or an add-on. However, to pull information in from Resourcing and Timesheets, you would need to enable those add-ons.
Who can add budgets? – Any project member can add budget information to a project. However, external users cannot change or modify budgets, they can only track time against action cards. Here’s a great break down of everything external users can and cannot do.
Can I track expenses in Hive? – Yes, you can add one-off expenses to the project budget in project overview, which will subtract from the overall budget. However, we do not have the functionality currently to approve or submit expense reports.