Project budgets that answer "are we on budget?" without double entry

Actuals are never stored in the budget. Each time you open the budget screen, CrmLeaf rolls up the project's approved expenses, timelog earnings, committed and billed purchase-order items, and invoices in real time. The budget can never disagree with the operational screens because it reads from the same source of truth.

Costs that no budget line claims land in a visible Uncategorised row, so the totals always reconcile and nothing goes unaccounted.

• Actuals derived live
• Zero manual entry
• Uncategorised row for reconciliation

A budget can be a single total - one number for the whole project - or itemized by any combination of category, cost code, phase, task, resource, or cost-type. Each line item declares where its actuals come from: approved expenses, timelog earnings, committed and billed PO items, a mix, or manual (plan-only, no live roll-up).

This flexibility means the same module serves a project manager tracking three broad categories and a construction estimator managing hundreds of cost codes across phases.

• Single total
• By category
• By cost code
• By phase
• By task
• By resource
• By cost-type

Budgets move through a clear lifecycle: draft, pending approval, approved and closed. Rejecting returns the budget to draft for correction. Approving locks the planned amounts - a rename or threshold tweak is still allowed, but to change numbers you revise, which clones the budget to a fresh draft at the next version and preserves the approved version on record.

Each project has one primary budget at a time. Closing captures a final snapshot of the position at closure, even though actuals are otherwise always derived live.

• Draft → Approve → Close
• Reject returns to draft
• Revise clones to new version
• One primary budget per project

The budget dashboard provides project-manager-grade analytics: usage percentage, variance (with and without commitments), burn rate with a projected exhaustion date, margin, category breakdown and an over-budget leaderboard ranking the worst offenders.

The full Earned Value Management panel compares the value of work completed against both the plan and the money spent. Values that cannot yet be computed show N/A rather than a misleading zero.

• Usage %
• Burn rate
• Projected exhaustion date
• Full EVM panel
• Over-budget leaderboard

CrmLeaf ships one budget schema, seeded differently per vertical, so a new budget starts with sensible structure and reports actuals immediately. Templates pull from the project's existing data - financial plans, solar estimates, task lists, or expense categories - so there is no blank-sheet problem.

• ConstructionCost codes and phases, seeded from the financial plan and estimates
• SolarEquipment, Labour, Permits and Incentives, seeded from the solar estimate's cost totals
• Project ManagementPhases and resources, seeded from the project's tasks
• GenericYour company's own expense categories as budget lines

Budget by resource to see how much each team member is costing a project. Timelog earnings per person roll up as live actuals, the over-budget leaderboard ranks who is consuming the budget fastest, and variance flags show which resources are running ahead of plan.

Combined with plan shapes by task or phase, resource-cost tracking gives you a complete picture of where labour spend is going - without maintaining a separate cost sheet outside the project.

• Budget by resource
• Timelog earnings per person
• Over-budget leaderboard
• Variance flags

A daily snapshot job captures burn-down and trend history. Threshold notifications fire when the overall budget or any individual line crosses its warning level - sent to the budget creator and the project administrator through your company's own SMTP and branding. An approval-request notification goes to approvers when a budget is submitted.

Three reports cover the operational side: Budget vs Actual, Project Cost Summary, and Over-budget - each exportable to CSV and PDF. A Budget tab on every project gives immediate access without leaving the project workspace.

• Daily snapshot
• Threshold notifications
• Approval notifications
• CSV + PDF export