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Setting a budget is a great way to track your project’s progress, and Harvest provides a variety of budget options that are ideal for projects that have a specific goal and a finite duration.
However, sometimes you need to track the progress of ongoing work that cannot be budgeted in its entirety. For example, perhaps you have a retainer agreement with a client, that specifies a set amount of work to be undertaken each month. This type of work has previously been difficult to budget in Harvest, because budgets have applied to the entire lifespan of a project, and retainer agreements often have no specified end date.
Previously, you might have duplicated a project each month in order to track a retainer against its budget. This required a lot of manual effort, and having multiple projects makes reporting that much more cumbersome.
Today, we’re introducing a new option to automatically reset a project’s budget every month. This option is available for all Time & Materials and Non-Billable projects, as well as for Fixed Fee projects that budget in hours.
When you create or edit a project, simply check the new Budget resets every month option that appears beneath the selected budget type, and enter the hours or fees that you want to budget for each month.
With this option enabled, Harvest will calculate the project’s budget spend using only tracked time (and expenses, where applicable) incurred during the current calendar month, rather than over the entire lifespan of the project. At the beginning of each new month, the budget spent will be 0%, and the budget remaining will be 100%.
If the option to Send email alerts if project exceeds % of budget is also checked, email notifications will be sent whenever the project exceeds the specified threshold amount within any given month.
On the project analysis page, you’ll find summary information focused on the current month, as well as a new Monthly Progress graph that makes it easy to see at a glance how the project has performed against the budget each month.
We hope this feature will make it easier for you to track the progress of your projects that are budgeted on a monthly basis. As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the team. Happy budgeting!
