Burn and breakdown charts – budget

The project budget burn and breakdown charts in the project view help you track and forecast how you’re progressing against your budget in terms of time and money. Both charts are located in the Budget health section in the Budget tab.

You can toggle between Budget and Time insights. This article focuses on the data in the Budget view, i.e. the dimension that helps you track and forecast money.

Burn chart

What is the chart for?

The Burn chart visualizes the budget and cost progress over the course of the project. 

It helps you understand at a glance:

• how you’re progressing against the budget based on delivered and planned work
• where you're currently predicted to end up cost- and profit-wise based on work that’s still to do

As a result, you can forecast the likely profit of your project way before it ends and detect signs of overservicing early enough when you still have time to course-correct to ensure profitability.

How to read the chart?

The chart tracks two different budgets simultaneously:

Total budget (teal line)

• This is the budget you agreed on with your client.
• It’s based on charge-out rates.
  • Formula: budgeted hours x selling price
• Ideally, you've already accounted for a profit within that budget. To turn a profit, you need to keep your costs under control, so this is where the cost budget comes into play.

Budgeted cost (purple line)

• This is your cost budget. It's for internal cost tracking and indicates how much you plan to spend on resources to actually deliver the work. 
• It’s based on internal cost rates.
  • Formula: budgeted hours x internal cost
• It shows how much the delivery will cost you as a business. It takes into account in-house and outsourced work.

So, in the end: total budget – actual costs at completion = your profit. 

The gradient area on the map helps to visualize the forecasted profit based on this data.

The chart tracks two different dimensions for both budget lines:

• Actual burn up to date (continuous line) – shows you actual progress based on work you've already completed.
• Forecasted burn (dotted line) – shows you how much budget you will still need to complete all the work you’ve planned.

You can hover over the lines to see the exact accumulated budget and cost numbers for that day. If you want to get a deeper understanding of the formulas behind those lines, check out the Advanced section below.

The metrics cards below the burn chart summarize the key data in numbers:

They help you answer the following questions at a glance:

The chart itself covers the whole project timeframe. The project timeframe is not limited to project start and end dates. It’s defined by project-related activities. In other words – if any task, time entry, or event falls outside of the project start and end dates, the displayed project period will be extended accordingly.

Things to keep in mind:

• With retainer projects, the burn chart shows data only for the current period.
• Tasks marked as “personal” are excluded from the chart.

Breakdown chart

What is the chart for?

The Breakdown chart shows you how your budget and costs are distributed across roles or services and where you’re likely to end up at the current pace. 

The breakdown chart can help you pinpoint what’s making your costs run over – if any of the bars turn red, it’s a clear sign you’re either:

• overutilizing some of the roles
• using too expensive resources
• putting in too many hours to deliver certain services

Based on this info, you can tackle the problematic role or service to protect your profit.

How to read the chart?

Scoro tracks two different dimensions for each role/service:

Total budget (teal bar on the left)

• This tracks the budget you've allocated for that role/service. The teal line indicates the budget limit.
• It’s based on chargeout rates. 
• Solid color indicates actual budget burn based on completed work.
• Striped part indicates the forecast based on planned work.

Budgeted cost (purple bar on the right)

• This is the cost dimension. It shows you how much you planned to spend on that particular role/service to deliver the work. The purple line indicates the budgeted limit.
• It’s based on internal cost rates.
• Solid color indicates costs incurred to date based on completed work. 
• Striped part indicates the forecasted costs based on planned work and bookings.

Each role or service will only have one bar on the chart. If the same role/service is used for several quote lines, the data will be merged. In case of multiple quotes, the totals for each role will also be merged into a single bar. Keep in mind that only successful quotes are taken into account.

Things to keep in mind:

• With service-based prices, you need to either
  • 1) create the task directly from the quote line, or
  • 2) link the task to the correct activity type
    as Scoro uses this info to connect the task and its progress with the right service on the chart
• With role-based prices: when a person logs time under a task that’s assigned to some other role, the logged time still counts towards their own role. For example, if a design task is assigned to a Senior Designer, but a Project Manager logs 30 minutes under it, these 30 minutes will be reflected in the progress bar of the ‘Project Manager’ role.
• With retainer projects, the burn chart shows data only for the current period.
• Tasks marked as “personal” are excluded from the chart.

Advanced

Retrospective data

The retrospective lines on the burn chart, which track actual data to date, are based purely on completed work.

In-house:

Budget line:

• Logged hours x the selling price = used budget to date
• Each event and time entry is reported on the completion date

Cost line:

• Logged hours x labor cost = actual cost to date
• Each event and time entry is reported on the completion date

Outsourced:

Budget line:

• Outsourced cost is reported on the budget line only once it has been invoiced to the client, i.e. you've created an invoice from that bill to pass the cost to the client.
• The invoiced sum is reported on the invoice issue date.

Cost line:

• Bill or expense is reflected on the recognition or issue date

Budget forecasting logic

This paragraph digs deeper into how the budget forecast line is formed on the burn chart.

In-house work

The budget forecast is based on the remaining time of planned tasks. 

If you've enabled billable time for your site, only the billable hours are counted in the budget forecast, as only these generate revenue for you.

Task distribution logic:

*The project timeframe is not limited to project start and end dates. It’s defined by project-related activities. In other words – if any task, time entry, or event falls outside of the project start and end dates, the project period will be extended accordingly.

Outsourced work

Outsourced cost is reported on the budget line only once it has been invoiced to the client. The invoiced sum is always reported on the invoice issue date. Therefore, outsourced work is most likely reflected in the retrospective data unless the invoice issue date is still in the future.

Cost forecasting logic

This paragraph digs deeper into how the cost forecast line is formed on the burn chart.

Scoro forecasts the project’s future cost based on planned in-house work and planned outsourced purchases. Even if you haven't planned any work yet, Scoro still tries to give you a rough estimate with the little data it has to be as helpful as possible.

At the same time, Scoro refrains from painting a picture that is too optimistic. For example, if you have defined a cost budget, the cost forecast on the burn chart will always be at least as high as your budgeted cost. Scoro always assumes you will incur these costs. This helps to protect you from an overly optimistic profit forecast early in the project when most of the work is not planned yet. The cost forecast will go red once you start exceeding your budgeted costs as this is the news you can react on.

Data that affects the cost forecast:

In-house costs

In-house costs are affected by:

1. Tasks and time entries
2. Bookings

Both are taken into account as they are signs of future cost. However, since they essentially reflect the same cost – a two-hour booking should eventually result in two hours' worth of tasks assigned to that same resource – the system is smart enough not to double-report them. 

We’ll dive more into that in the Bookings vs tasks paragraph below, but first, let’s see how both of them affect the cost forecast line independently.

Tasks and time entries

With task and time entries, Scoro assumes that every future minute will generate cost, whether billable or not. Why? Because even if you don’t bill the client for something, it’s still a cost for your business.

Task costs are distributed across the workdays that dall within the task duration.

Task distribution logic:

*The project timeframe is not limited to project start and end dates. It’s defined by project-related activities. In other words – if any task, time entry, or event falls outside of the project start and end dates, the project period will be extended accordingly.

Bookings

Every booking has a cost associated with it because booked time indicates eventual work and therefore cost for your business.

With tasks, you have the past part (completed work) and the future part (remaining work). If you don’t complete the remaining work today, the remaining hours are simply rolled over to the future. The remaining hours remain part of the forecast dimension until you complete them.

Bookings work differently. A booking is considered a reservation for that particular day. If a part of the booking passes, it’s not rolled over. The past part is simply discarded. This is because the past chunk of the booking should already be covered by something actionable, such as an event or a time entry, and reflected in the retrospective data.

This image illustrates how tasks and bookings differ when it comes to rolling over hours:

Bookings vs tasks

The cost forecast takes both tasks and bookings into account. However, since they essentially reflect the same cost – a two-hour booking should eventually result in two hours' worth of tasks assigned to that same resource – the system is smart enough not to double-report them.

How? The system compares the cumulative cost of booked hours and the cumulative cost of tasks on a user level every single day to determine which one is higher. Whichever is higher at any point in time is reported in the chart. 

Cumulative hours => the hours are added on each day. 

• For example: You’ve booked 6 hours for Monday, 6 hours for Tuesday, and 6 hours for Wednesday. It accumulates as 6 hours on Monday, 12 hours by Tuesday, 18 hours by Wednesday.

Here's how the cost forecast line is formed based on this cumulative comparison:

Here’s the same logic broken down in a table format:

Outsourced costs

Outsourced costs affect the cost forecast line based on bills, expenses, and purchase orders (optional).

Document	When it’s reported
Bill	Reported on the recognition date. If you don’t use recognition dates, then the bill is reported on the bill issue date.
Scheduled bill	Reported on the bill date In case of indefinite scheduled bills, the system will consider only the bills that are scheduled to go out within the project timeframe.
Expense	Reported on the recognition date. If you don’t use recognition dates, then the expense is reported on the expense issue date.
Purchase order	Reported on the purchase order date.  POs are considered in the cost forecast only if the setting Consider purchase orders as committed cost is enabled. Even if the PO issue date is not in the future, the PO still counts towards forecasted cost. The PO flow works only when bills are created from the PO itself. If bills are received via an integration, it does not work yet.

As long as the value of the PO is higher than the value of the received bill(s), the system will calculate the cost forecast based on the PO value. This is because the system assumes you will still receive a bill for the unsettled part. Once you mark the PO as settled, only the bill values are counted.

Illustrative example:

Profit forecasting logic

The formula behind forecasted profit depends on the project type:

1. Fixed-price project, i.e. budget is defined
   Budget – forecasted cost at completion = forecasted profit
2. Time and material project, i.e. budget is not defined
   Forecasted revenue based on planned work – forecasted cost at completion = forecasted profit

Permissions – who can see what?

As labor cost is sensitive info, you can hide the cost information from non-relevant users via permission sets. See the below table for reference to fine-tune the permissions:

 

FAQ