Work a project's budget

One working ledger of cost codes, then the financing underneath it, then the invoices billed against it.

The budget tab opens on four numbers: the budget, what has been spent, what remains, and the borrower's share. Under them sits the working ledger, which is the developer's own cost codes. Under that sits financing, and under that the invoice register.

The ledger stands on its own. A project has a budget before it has a lender, and an all-equity deal never gets one, so nothing here waits on a loan to exist. Loans attach underneath with their facility, their lender lines and their terms.

Reading a cost code row

A row reads as a sentence about the code: this is what it holds, this is what has already been promised out of it, this is what has actually been billed, and this is what is left.

Committed sits between budget and spent because that is where it falls in the sentence. A commitment is spending that has been decided and has not arrived yet.

Remaining is budget less spent, not budget less committed. Subtracting both would count the same money twice on its way through, and a subcontract that has been fully invoiced would read as consuming its line twice over. Where a line is promised past its budget, the committed figure says so on its own.

The Total row, and what it foots to

Every figure on the Total row is the sum of the column above it. Original is the sum of the Original column, which is each line's recorded baseline where one was taken, not the current budget less approved moves: those two are the same number only where nothing has drifted, and the point of a baseline is to say when something has.

Spent to date counts every invoice on the project, and the Spent column counts only the ones that name a cost code. Where those differ, the difference gets a row of its own, called "Not tied to a cost code", above the Total. So the Spent and Remaining columns add up to the Total exactly, and the invoices with nowhere to land are visible rather than absorbed into a number nobody can reproduce. The Excel download writes the same row, so the file and the screen say the same thing. And the download is computed from every row or not at all: if a read fails while the file is being built, the export answers with an error instead of a workbook with a quietly blank column.

Moves and change orders

Two different things can change a budget and the page keeps them apart. A reallocation moves money between cost codes and leaves the total exactly where it was. A change order is new scope and new money, and it moves the total.

That distinction is the reason a budget can grow without anybody deciding that it should, so both live on this page where the difference is visible.

Both ends of a move stay on this project. A move whose source or destination code belongs to another project is refused when it is proposed and refused again when somebody tries to approve it, so budget never crosses a project boundary on the strength of an identifier that was not checked. Neither end may be a retired code either: a retired code takes no new postings, and an approved move is a posting on both sides of it.

Every move says who proposed it and who approved it. Where those are the same person the row says that too, in the Changes view, beside the status. It is not refused: a one-person workspace has nobody else to ask, and a rule that made a move impossible there would be a wall rather than a control. If your workspace wants two names on a move, the ledger is where you can see which moves have one.

A change order is filed under its own number, and re-entering that number amends the order rather than filing a second one. Submitting the form twice leaves one row, so a single order is never counted twice over as obligation against the ledger, or twice over as exposure the lender has not been told about.

The views under the page

Financing, the lender line map, invoices, borrower funds and the interest reserve are views off this page rather than separate screens. You reach each one from the row that summarises it, and the page returns to that view after a change, so the page opens on the numbers you came for.