Track Budgeted vs. Actual Hours in Zoho Projects
Why Do You Need a Budget for Your Projects?
Whether you’re preparing a report for the CFO or for external stockholders and clients, tracking and comparing your budgeted vs. actual hours in Zoho Projects is a great way to show that you are meeting your company’s goals, and offering incredible value to clients.
A project budget is a great way to gauge if your team is meeting its goals, or if there are areas where your team can improve. Zoho Projects offers a robust task management solution for growing teams.
What is Zoho Projects?
Zoho Projects is a popular cloud-based project management software that is jam-packed with options to record and track your employees’ work and hours.
Start Tracking Your Budgeted vs. Actual Hours in Zoho Projects
- First, log into Zoho Projects.
- Next, select Projects from the left sidebar.
- Then, select New Project in the top right corner.
- Next, enter in your Project Title
- Scroll down to Project Hours and select the dropdown menu. You have several options to choose from.
- Then, select from the Project Budget dropdown. This option allows you to bill the client based on projected total hours to complete a project. For example, if you provide a client with a quote of 20 to 25 hours, you can enter the details as follows:
- Currency: Choose your currency
- Project Budget: Based on Project Hours
- Budget Hours: 25
- Next, Click Add in the top left corner on the Tasks page to add a new project.
- After adding a task, refresh the page to see your updated Task list.
- Then, click on one of the tasks and begin editing.
- Next, to log hours in a task, scroll down on the individual Task window > Log Hours > Add Time Log.
- Remember that this project has 25 budgeted total project hours. Let’s enter a time log for 12 hours.
- If you’ve successfully entered the actual hours, you’ll see them appear on the individual task page:
- Next, in this example, the hours are entered as follows:
- January 8th – 12 hours on Task 3
- January 11th – 12 hours on Task 2
- January 11th – 12 hours on Task 1
- = Total of 36 hours completed on this project
- This exceeds the 25 budgeted hours for the project
- Finally, on the page for the individual project, you can view all the hours entered for each task by scrolling to the right.
- To review your project and see Budgeted vs. Actual Hours, click on Projects in the left sidebar and scroll to the right.
- If you do not see your actual hours, you may have to wait a few hours for Zoho Projects to update. By default, Zoho Projects updates your project budget once every 6 hours. If you’d like to decrease this time frame, please follow the steps below:
Recommended: Turn On and Change Your Budget Notifications
Recommended: Turn on Budget Settings by click on the Setup icon in the top right corner.
First, navigate to Project & Budget in the left sidebar > Budget Settings tab, and modify settings to your preference.
If you’d like more frequent budget auto updates, change the Budget Auto Update Frequency to the highest frequency, every 3 hours.
