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Creating a budget

Jared Johnson avatar
Written by Jared Johnson
Updated over 5 years ago

This article will walk you through creating a budget.

The Basics

(Important prerequisites) - Before you can use the budget module, you must first select or import your budget categories. We'll help you do this, or you can setup yourself in the company settings. 

What is the Budget

The budget is truly the core of BuildTools. The budget functions much like a spreadsheet, but fine tuned for use in managing construction projects. Many of the columns are populated automatically by other modules - change orders, purchase orders, invoices are all automatically calculated based on work you do in other modules. Clicking on these calculated columns (on the number directly) will navigate you to a screen which displays the underlying information.

Many other modules tie back to the budget categories as a means of keeping everything organized. Selections are related to the budget categories, for example. For this reason, you should consider creating budget categories that will work well across many of the other modules.

Creating your new budget

Navigate to the Budget module. 

Now that you're in the budget module you'll need to add additional cost codes. Assuming that you have setup the fees when you created the new project, they will appear as the sole budget categories. You can now either add budget categories individually, or copy an entire budget from a template or past project. 

To add budget categories individually, click on the Green + icon in the upper left menu bar.  Then select budget categories individually from the list.  Finish by clicking the Add button in the bottom right corner.  You can insert all categories by clicking the double right arrows.

Alternately, you can click the Load from Template icon in the import export menu and copy a budget you've previously setup:

You can then select the project from which you'd like to copy the budget, then decide how much information you want to copy.  Choose if you want to copy the last published budget, or the current working budget.  Selecting Resources will copy the contractors and vendors you'd used on the selected project.  You can copy the specifications.  If you've already added some budget categories to the current project, you can preserve those and copy only new categories in the settings, or you can choose to over write the entire budget and replace with the one selected.

You can now enter the details of your budget.  You can enter amounts directly on each line:


Or, you can double click the line item and enter the details through the slide-out tab. You can access everything that is related to the budget category through this tab, and the sub-tabs.  

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