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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Project Budgets

Setup Considerations: Project Budgets

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of project budgets. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Project Budgets is the primary financial component within Projects. It enables you to analyze:
  • Budget versus actuals.
  • Cost versus revenue.
  • Labor versus nonlabor.
  • Primary variance contributors by various dimensions like ledger account, spend or revenue category, and supplier.

Business Benefits

Project budgets support:
  • Analysis of project budget versus actuals across your organization.
  • Automated labor cost calculations based on standard cost rates and forecasted hours.
  • Automated revenue calculations based on contract rates, fixed fee installments, or fixed fee percent complete (hours).
  • Worktag dimensions.

Use Cases

With project budgets, you can:
  • Create high-level project duration budgets or more detailed monthly budgets.
  • Create custom reports to understand your project revenue and costs.
  • Develop flexible project budgets at different levels of granularity.
  • Use Worksheets to update and maintain project budgets.
  • View live data on project progress, time, and spend, as well as budgets and forecasts.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
What project budget types do you need to manage?
You can create budgets to manage your cost projects, revenue projects, or both. Project budgets are available for:
  • Cost with Workday Projects.
  • Revenue with Workday Project Billing.
You can:
  • Define default cost and revenue worktags for time to include in budget lines. Workday then:
    • Assigns worktags from your selected forecast source.
    • Uses the worktags when you don't list them on the project as related worktags.
  • Identify actuals and forecasts to bring actuals into the budget, to create an Estimate at Completion (EAC). Select from time blocks and ad hoc time, journal lines, or both.
  • Identify whether to create your forecast sources for your budget from hours in the resource plan, resource forecast, or neither.
  • Create a calculation type for each variation you want to make available for creating budgets.
  • Manage budgets using worksheets.
  • Use segmented security so that project managers can view only their budget.
What configuration level do you need to manage your project budgets?
You can configure your project budget at the project hierarchy level, the tenant level, or both.
Project hierarchy configurations take precedence over tenant configurations.
Will you create your budget using prior actuals?
For cost budgets that you want to include actuals in, use this configuration to identify:
  • Ledger accounts
  • Spend categories
  • Ledger accounts and spend categories
For revenue budgets, include ledger accounts and revenue categories.
What dimensions do you want to track?
Create a plan structure and include the relevant dimensions.
You can make these dimensions required or optional. Each budget line must include required dimensions.
What plan line attributes do you want to track?
By default, Workday classifies the plan lines for project budgets as cost or revenue.
You can also configure Workday to classify the plan lines for project budgets as labor or nonlabor.
You can use the plan line attributes in custom reports to understand the financial health of your project.
What resource forecast level do your project budgets have?
Workday generates resource forecasts at the:
  • Project level - Including the worker and their forecasted hours.
  • Project Plan Task level - Including the worker and their project task or forecasted hours for each task.

Recommendations

When maintaining multiple budget periods at once, use Worksheets rather than updating each period individually.
Maintain at least 2 calculation types. These calculations types are:
  • Baseline, which shouldn't include actuals.
  • Forecast, which should include actuals.

Requirements

To ensure that Workday calculates Project Budgets accurately, you should:
  • Understand projects.
  • Understand project resource plans if generating your budget from your resource forecast or resource plan.
  • For managing your project labor costs, create your standard cost rate sheet.
  • For revenue budgets, define your project billing dependencies in Workday.
  • For setting up budget check options, understand budgetary control functionality.

Limitations

Workday doesn't:
  • Include committed costs, such as purchase orders in project budgets. You can manually add these transactions as budget line items.
  • Support fully burdened costing, or percent complete by cost.
  • Support the creation of workbooks from project plan budgets with more than 500 periods.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domain
Considerations
Set Up: Project Hierarchy
 in the Projects functional area
Can configure and update project budgets on the project hierarchy.
Set Up: Project Budget
 in the Projects functional area
Can configure and update project budgets on the tenant.
Manage: Project Budget
 in the Projects functional area
Can manage and view budget information.
Manage: Project Resource Forecast
 in the Projects functional area
Can manage and view resource forecast information.
Access Plan Type (segmented)
 in the Budgets and Projects functional areas
Can control access to project budgets.
Workday uses multiple roles to configure project budgets. However, since several steps in the process are one-time only, project budgets require minimal maintenance.
Role
Considerations
Security Administrator
Configures security. Adds project administrators to the proper security groups.
Budget Administrator
Adds Project as an entry type.
Project Administrator
Configures project budgets on the:
  • Tenant
  • Project hierarchy
Defines standard cost rates for:
  • Workers based on worker attributes.
  • Unnamed resources based on project roles.
Project Hierarchy Administrator
Defines the project budget by configuring:
  • The project hierarchy or tenant to draw from specific dimensions from the budget structure.
  • The plan calculation types to drive the different types of plans enabled in the hierarchy or tenant.
Project Manager
Creates and updates project budgets.
Creates plans as outlined by the plan structure and project hierarchy configurations. Assigns plans as baselines or forecasts to compare variances across projects in the hierarchy or tenant.
Creates a revised budget for changes to:
  • Contracts.
  • Resource forecasts.
  • Worker time blocks.
  • Past period actuals.
Manages budgetary control options.
Tracks spend and revenue.
Analyzes:
  • Profit and losses
  • Return on investments
Contract Administrator for Revenue Budgets
Defines the billing rate that Workday uses to calculate the revenue budget.

Business Processes

Business Processes
Considerations
Assign Plan as Baseline Event
Can designate the calculation type as a baseline budget.
Budget Amendment Event
Can submit amendments for budget templates requiring approval or amendment.
Plan Event
Can create a budget when the budget template requires approval or amendments.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
Project Budgetary Balance With Labor Cost
You can compare the budget for a project to the actual cost. This report doesn't apply to duration budgets.
Project Hierarchy Baseline vs. Forecast
Enables organization level reporting on baseline versus forecast at your project hierarchy or tenant level. You can customize this report to include the dimensions and variance thresholds appropriate for your organization.
You can use these report data sources to create custom reports:
  • All Budget Amendments
  • Budget Amendments by Organization
  • Project Budget Calculation Details

Integrations

You can use these web services to upload your project budgets:
  • Import Budget
  • Import Budget Amendment
  • Put Project Budget Template

Connections and Touchpoints

Project Budgets interacts with:
  • Financial accounting.
  • Time tracking.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.