A budget serves two very important functions: to verify job costs as you enter them, and to facilitate cost comparisons. You can enter budgets manually, copy them from Excel spreadsheets or export them from Estimates.. A variety of reports use the Budget such as the Work in Progress report, the Bonding report, and Job Status report, as well as other reports that compare costs by cost code, cost type, and totals. Budgets also can track labor hours for every cost code, making it easy to produce reports on productivity throughout the course of the job.

Because Change Orders enable you to modify a Budget without changing the initial figures, you can track a budget from the original amounts through the final contract.