Project Budget Template

Creating the project budget template shouldn’t be geared towards imposing limits on your investment; instead, it should be about managing the expenditure in a manner that makes it both feasible and exciting for your stakeholders. In other words, the project budget is an instrument that helps you direct the money spent, to avoid ending up wondering where your finances have gone.

However, many of us still shudder at the thought of sitting down and writing the budget proposal example. There’re enough variables involved to make your head spin and finding your footing feels nearly impossible. Let’s try to change this negative mindset with a quick rundown of the basics and introduce you to our simple project budget template in the form of a budget timeline. It’s the first step towards making your budgeting activity a lot easier.

What is a project budget template?

Project budgets are by no means fixed documents. You’ll definitely need to ready the sample of budget proposal for project kickoff meetings, sure! Still, they are meant to be adaptive templates and will require multiple calibrations throughout the enterprise’s lifecycle. But what should the project budget tracking template include? Here’s a quick overview of the categories of project deliverable costs:

• Labor expenses
• Material procurement expenses
• Operating costs

How does a detailed budget proposal example of costs look?

A more comprehensive breakdown of your cost tracking spreadsheet could contain:

• Human resource expenditures like salary rates and payments for freelance work;
• Traveling expenses when the project spans multiple locations;
• Training costs, such workshops or conferences for employees or for external contractors;
• Equipment, software or materials-related spendings;
• Research expenditure such as studies to support the value or feasibility of the undertaking;
• Contingency funds, that cover unpredicted expenses, to improve flexibility and prevent budget overruns.

Why do you need a project management budget template?

One obvious answer to this question is that without funds, the project can’t get off the ground in the first place. The budget represents the beating heart of any enterprise and, like any heart, its role is to direct and distribute the financial lifeblood exactly where it’s needed.

Plus, before your stakeholders and management can approve the project, they will need to evaluate the budget proposal example, in terms of investment value and how the money is spent. On a side note, we believe there’s no better way to create an enticing narrative than the budget timeline, which not only breaks down the costs for each project phase but also shows when finances are needed.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that the budget timeline template is essentially a profitability benchmark. To put it simply, it allows project managers to use it as a baseline in measuring the estimated performance of the project throughout all its phases against the actual costs.

Using the project budget timeline template

We created this project budget template using Office Timeline, a powerful and easy to use add-in for PowerPoint and you can download it free of charge along with other fully customizable timeline templates. Download the free version to test it out first hand or discover the Pro+ Edition and learn how to create timelines that will awe your stakeholders and guarantee an approved project budget every single time.