Project Budget Tracker Spreadsheet

Each week, our project managers fill out a Weekly Project Budget Tracker on a shared Google Sheets file indicating how many total hours were spent by the team on their projects in the past week and how that compares to the projected hours in Harvest Forecast, the tool we use for resource planning. When everyone has filled it out, we get an estimate of billable hours logged for the past week, and more importantly, how we're tracking against the overall budget (e.g. will we come in over or under budget?).

You may be asking why we don't just go into Harvest (the time tracking software) and view the weekly report. We instituted the Weekly Project Budget Tracker as a way to get our project managers in the habit of checking the numbers of their projects, making sure everyone on their team put in their hours correctly, and to take the time to review the numbers and see how they're faring against the estimates they made when allocating resources at the start of the project.

We track both fixed fee and hourly (time & material) projects on this. For hourly projects, we typically put in an estimate of what we think the final number will be, or in some cases, the cap that we've set with our clients on total hours we can bill.

Directions: For each week, duplicate the sheet and relabel it with the new week's dates.

This is an Excel file (.xlsx). We recommend rebuilding this on Google Sheets if you want people collaborating on it simultaneously.