Top 7 Project Budget Management Tools: Optimize Your Project Budgeting

Support efficient budgeting, scheduling, and team management with the right project budget management software.

A survey by Blackline from 2019 shows that almost 70% of global business leaders and financial professionals make significant decisions based on outdated or incorrect financial data. Project budget management tools can help you avoid this fate by automating data gathering and analysis and delivering more accurate reports.

In this article, we’ll go through some basics of budget management and provide you with a list of management tools you can use to optimize your financial operations.

Project budget management is the process of determining, managing, and executing a project budget. It starts during the project initiation phase when the project manager will create a rough estimate of the necessary budget in collaboration with the client.

The definitive budget is set in place during the project planning phase, by taking into account the totality of the agency’s resources, including project teams and their time. Of course, even at this stage, the budget isn’t set in stone, as it will be affected by internal and external changes at every step of the project execution.

Learn more about the End to End Project Management Lifecycle.

Budgeting plans should always take into account potential roadblocks, based both on historical project data and the specifics of the current project. Managers can account for this variance either by incorporating a risk response budget to be used in case of emergencies or, for example, by setting alternative budgets:

Source: Budgeting And Forecasting For The Upcoming Year (Forbes)

To summarize, project budgeting is the process of determining and maintaining a project budget by constantly reassessing resources and accounting for changes in the project process. In the following section, we’ll go through the key features, benefits, and downsides of tools that support managers in their project management budget control.

Effective budget management can be significantly easier to achieve with the right business budgeting software. Such tools can support the gathering and analysis of key insights from past projects, help managers determine employee skills and achieve optimal utilization, make informed decisions on the fly, and efficiently implement changes to the budget.

Without further ado, here is our list of the top 7 project cost management tools available on the market:

Productive is an all-in-one agency project management software solution with advanced budgeting and financial forecasting features.

With Productive, you can handle all of your business operations, from project and task management, to budgeting, financial insights, sales forecasting, project documentation, and much more. Streamline your collaboration and gain key agency insights that can help you scale your agency’s growth with accurate, timely data.

Learn how Productive helped a worldwide digital agency optimize business operations.

Time tracking is one of the most essential processes you can introduce into your day-to-day agency operations and Productive makes it stress-free. Time tracking powers up essential analytics such as agency utilization, and allows you to get full control over your employee’s workloads.

Furthermore, Productive offers your teams multiple ways of tracking their time to account for varying workflows, from tracking time directly from tasks, to inputting total time worked or time ranges after the fact. Additionally, project managers can schedule work for their teammates with exact hour ranges, and pull them automatically for time entries.

Learn more about the top time tracking software for small businesses.

Productive’s time tracking powers up your agency’s budget management. Track billable and nonbillable hours across services to generate accurate cost reports. With Productive’s Budgeting, you can build and manage any type of budget, whether hourly, fixed-price, or mixed. If you’re on a retainer, you can also set recurring budgets, or for complex projects, split them up into separate phases.

Once you’ve set up your budget, you can keep a close track of your progress – any changes you make to your scheduling, whether by shifting your team members or extending deadlines, will automatically be applied to your budgeting. Forecast your budget overruns and get profitability reports for your budget spend and future profit margins.

Once it’s time to process your payments, Productive supports your invoicing with the Billing feature. Track invoiced amounts automatically by pulling uninvoiced time entries, or the remaining budget amounts on fixed-price projects.

The best project accounting software streamlines your administrative work and lets you stay on top of your payments. Productive offers automated reminders, flexibility with currencies and invoicing for multiple projects and services, and reports for all billing activities.

Additionally, Productive’s Purchase Orders let you get in touch with your suppliers directly from the platform – track all your bills and get detailed expense reports with a single click.

Productive’s Resource Planning feature pulls in all information from platform activities to support managers in creating a high-level project resource management template.

Along with time entries, Productive tracks employee leave management to create a full picture of project team availability – Productive’s Integrations allow you to link Productive with a range of HR tools, so you can get the most out of all your software.

Use heatmaps to see who is overbooked and who is available. This helps you achieve the perfect utilization across your teams and learn more about the resource planning process.

Forget about manually creating your financial reports. Get consolidated data from multiple sources with templates for over 50 agency-focused reports, including Actual Utilization by People, Invoiced Revenue by Client, Profitability by Client, Time Off Usage by People, Forecasted Unprofitable Budgets, and many more. Productive also lets you input custom fields with additional information into your reports, so you can enrich your data further.

Additional features include: Project Management, Sales, Docs.

Integrations include: Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Breathe, Zapier, Slack, Jira, and more.

Productive offers a 14-day free trial, so you can check out whether it’s the right project budget management software for your agency.

Smartsheet is a work management platform that offers simple project budget management functionalities, along with other project execution features. Reviewers praise the management tool for its user-friendly interface and collaborative features.

Key features:

Users on G2 comment that Smartsheet is a great project management tool for small businesses, but tricky to scale. Additionally, though Smartsheet is a suitable budgeting tool for agencies that need essential budgeting insights, the tool lacks some advanced features such as financial forecasting of key agency metrics, such as agency profit and revenue. Companies that are looking to invest in a tool that scales with their operations might want to consider a more robust option.

QuickBooks is a project budgeting software solution that focuses on providing accounting support to small businesses. QuickBooks provides a suite of features designed to help financial teams save time on repetitive tasks.

Key features:

QuickBooks is a good app for smaller businesses looking to streamline the accounting side of their project budgeting process. However, for a tool that takes a more in-depth approach to project plans and productivity reports, considering an option with robust features is recommended.

We also have a Netsuite vs Quickbooks comparison you can check out. QuickBooks is also a Time Doctor alternative, so head over there for additional options.

SAP business solutions provide a suite of platforms for business resource planning, CRM, human capital, management, logistics, business networks, and more. SAP focuses on helping businesses control their costs and achieve future growth with three financial management solutions: SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP Profitability and Performance Management.

Key features:

Though SAP is undoubtedly a powerful platform for all sorts of business operations management, users frequently note that the cost of implementation can get steep, alongside the expenses for upgrading and maintaining functionalities. Additionally, decision-making can be more difficult and lengthier due to a variety of potential solutions that can be integrated or used separately.

Anaplan is a platform that supports strategic, financial, and operational planning for a wide range of industries, including consumer goods, financial and business services, manufacturing, retail, and technology and media.

Key features:

Reviewers on G2 praise Anaplan for its powerful scenario planning and budgeting functionalities but highlight the higher price point, difficulty of implementation, and steep learning curve as some of the main cons. Other users also report performance issues when the platform is handling large amounts of data, such as sluggish loading.

Wrike is a platform for managing collaborative projects with task management, resource management, and basic features for expense management and reporting. Users on Capterra praise Wrike for helping cross-functional teams accomplish their goals on one platform.

Key features:

Although Wrike is a good option for team collaboration and project management, managers might find that some advanced financial management features could be better developed, such as agency utilization insights, profit forecasting, and revenue and profitability insights by each business unit.

Learn more about the importance of managing business revenue in our RevOps Guide.

Toggl Track is an online project management software solution that is focused on time tracking as its central feature. Users who review Toggl Track positively mainly focus on how easy it is to track hours and get time-related reports.

Key features:

Overall, Toggl Track is a simple project management budget software solution, well-suited for smaller teams with a time-tracking pain point. However, for forward-looking agencies and larger companies, investing in a solution with more robust financial forecasting and reporting features might be a better choice.

The benefits of automating your financial management are numerous. For one, budget management tools can deliver reports in real time with insights that adapt to every minor project activity. This reduces the time and effort spent updating countless reports and eliminates the potential for human error to near zero.

Managing your reports through budgeting software can also benefit your team collaboration, making sharing relevant data and keeping everyone up to date on changes effortless. This extends to your clients, as you can easily invite them to check project budgets and progress themselves or export and forward project reports with a single click.

In short, project budget management tools can cut costs by providing essential information when needed, improving communication, and optimizing your agency project management, thus boosting overall business growth.

Though the choice of the best budget management tool will depend on your agency, your industry, and your project type, there are some basics that all software should aim to cover.

This includes customization and scalability for various agency types, robust budgeting, reporting and professional billing services features, streamlined user interface and onboarding process, and security and data protection.

How can you ensure that your chosen tool has all of the above? One good option is to check reviews from reputable sites such as G2 or Capterra.

Another is to keep an eye on how active the vendor is, through newsletters, product updates, or social media posts.

This will give you an insight into their customer service and show you whether the software will be capable of growing step by step with your organization.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one agency management software solution with robust financial management features, book a demo with Productive.

Project budgeting is a complex process that requires engagement with multiple parts of the management process, including resource management and allocation, overall project progress and task management, and finally financial planning and budgeting itself. Therefore, depending on your agency’s structure, industry, your project team’s knowledge of financial tools, and the specificities of your project, there’s a wide array of choices you might consider for efficient budgeting. Some of them are the following:

There are several techniques that can be applied to the project budgeting process, but we can separate them into three main categories:

There are a couple of phases connected with project budget management. At the start, a project manager needs to define the budget by considering project deliverables and schedules, usually in collaboration with the client. This is when a budget plan is created, first by considering the entire project scope with top-down estimating, then by breaking it up and determining the project expenses of the smallest constituents with bottom-up estimating.

After, the process of managing the budget begins, by tracking expenses and accounting for any internal and external changes – this might require additional communication with the client and the rebalancing of budgets, whether to secure additional funding or to ensure that the project stays on budget.

Handling project billing and generating invoices is another budget management facet that project managers might be part of a manager’s workload – a budget management software solution might significantly help streamline this administrative task by pulling data automatically from your project. Finally, by project close, budget management includes the analysis of data, aimed towards determining how the project impacted the overall agency strategy and financials.

A budgeting tool is a type of management solution that supports successful project completion with various budgeting features. A budget management tool can help managers create a project budget plan, forecast potential scenarios to prevent or mitigate budget overruns and gather key performance indicators to optimize future project progress.

Some features of a good project budget software solution are: Flexible budget creation that takes into account your project type (one-time or recurring; fixed-price, hourly, or mixed; single-phase or multiple phases), streamlined billing that allows you to save time, simplified continuous management with real-time updates that take into account all project activities, and key data metrics that provide insights into agency revenue, utilization rate, and profit margins with financial forecasting.