The Estimated Cost field helps you record how much you expect a service to cost before any work or expenses are logged.
It’s also useful when you want to plan spend on non-hourly services—such as events, materials, or departmental expenses—without creating real expenses yet.
When to Use Estimated Cost
Use Estimated Cost when you need to:
Plan expected spend for upcoming expenses (e.g. trade shows, workshops, or vendor fees).
Keep a cost baseline for services, whether set to Piece, Hours, or Days.
Compare your planned spend with what was actually logged later, including both time entries and expenses.
Where to Find the Estimated Cost Field
When editing or creating a service in a budget or a deal, you’ll see a new Estimated Cost field in the service editor. You can:
Leave it empty,
Enter a manual value (e.g., €30,000), or
Have it automatically populated when applying a scenario.
📌 Make sure to add the Estimated Cost field if you do not see it in your editor.
Once you save your budget or deal with the estimations added, make sure to add the Estimated Cost field to your view in the Services tab. This lets you see the projected costs directly in the live budget alongside other service details.
📌 Each change is logged in the feed for full visibility — for example:
“Estimated cost changed €5,000 → €6,000.”
Estimated Cost in Scenarios
When you apply a scenario to a deal or budget, Productive automatically writes the service costs from that scenario into the Estimated Cost field.
This is especially useful when you assign people to services in the scenario. Productive instantly calculates their cost rates per unit and updates the Estimated Cost accordingly, helping you preview profitability before committing to changes.
📌 For example, in the scenario below, the Meetings service has 20 planned hours in total. Alex is assigned to 10 hours at a cost rate of $30/hour, and Manny to another 10 hours at $50/hour. The total estimated cost for the service is therefore $800.
📌 Tip: Expand the profitability details by selecting the < arrow to see revenue, cost, and profit for the services.
Once this scenario is applied, the Estimated Cost column in the live budget shows $800 for the Meetings service, and the Cost column will track the cost of hours logged by Alex and Manny so you can see how actual costs compare to the estimate.
📌 Tip: To keep the cost calculations and estimations precise, you can restrict the service so that only Alex and Manny can track time against it. This helps ensure that your estimated and actual costs stay aligned.
For expense-based line items, you can plan upcoming costs line by line—such as venue fees, materials, or travel—directly in the scenario.
Once the scenario is applied, Productive automatically totals those projected costs per service, and the Estimated Cost field in the live budget reflects them.
Where You’ll See the Data
In Budgets: add the Estimated Cost column to your service table to review projected costs alongside service prices and billing setup.
In Reports: use the field in Deal, Budget, Service, Rate Card, or Financial Item reports to compare estimated vs actual costs.
📌 Note: Scheduled Cost is available only in financial item data-source reports and may differ from Estimated Cost depending on your setup.
Example Use Case
You’re planning several trade shows and other services for next quarter. Each is added as a service—some set to Piece (expenses), some set to Hours.
Enter the planned spend in Estimated Cost. For example, €10,000 per show or projected hours cost for a service.
Later, as work is done and expenses are logged, the Cost column reflects all actual values. This gives you a clear variance between what you planned and what was spent—without cluttering your budget with placeholder entries.