Using Budget Resources in Microsoft Project 2013
Synopsis: In some situations, you may need to prepare a budget for a project without making detailed resource assignments and cost estimates. Project 2013 can use as budget resources.
In the early stages of working on a project, what you sometimes need is to produce a high-level budget without yet having a detailed breakdown of the tasks and resources. If you need to do that you can use budget resources.
Let’s take a specific example.
You have a building project and are working on a high-level breakdown of the work needed. You have estimated that the amount of work to be done is 210 days and that the total cost of materials, plant hire, etc. is $195,000.
First of all, create a new resource called Labor. This has a resource type of Work. In the Resource Information dialog, make sure that the Budget check box towards the middle right is checked (✅).
You now need to assign this resource to the project. Don’t assign it to a specific task as it is only to be used for budgetary purposes. This is applied to the whole project! To do this, assign it to the Project Summary Task.
The Project Summary Task default is not shown in Project 2013. It can be shown by checking the box in the Show/Hide group on the Format tab when you are in Gantt Chart view.
The Project Summary Task appears as a summary task for the whole project as shown here. (Note here that the Project Summary Task check box towards the top right is checked.)
Now you need to assign the Labor budget resource. To do that, simply select the Project Summary Task, then on the Resource tab in the Assignments group choose Assign Resources.
Select the Labor Resource. Click Assign to assign it to the Project Summary Task. Click Close to close this dialog. Note that it is not possible to specify the number of units to assign at this point. It has to be done in a suitable view of the project, with Task Usage or Resource Usage views being the best options.
Select Task Usage view. Move the vertical view divider to the right until you can see the Add New Column column.
Click on the column header and a long list of available fields appears. Select Budget Work and that becomes a new column in the table.
You can now type in the budget estimate of work against the Labor resource for the Project Summary Task. Depending on the options you have set up in your installation of the Project 2013 and the current project. The work may appear expressed in different units. In this example, I typed the work as 210 days but it appears as 1680 hours.
The procedure for setting up the budget for the costs is similar. Set up a budget resource of type Cost and assign it to the Project Summary Task.
Add the Budget Cost field to the table in Task Usage view and enter a budget cost of $195,000 against the resource you have just created. You now have both of your budget resources set up.
As the project progresses and you start to record actual work and costs you can compare them with your budget if necessary.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!