Budgets & financials
Project money end to end - budget lines, committed vs. actual, change orders, purchase orders, invoices, and point-in-time snapshots.
Project financials answer the question every owner asks in every meeting: are we on budget, and if not, why? The model tracks money in three states - budgeted, committed, actual - with the paper trail connecting them.
Budget items
The approved budget breaks into budget items - line items with a category and amount. Categories are a fixed set: lump sum, labor, materials, equipment, subcontractors, permits, contingency, and other. Lines give variance reporting its rows; a single-line budget can only ever say "over" or "under".
The financial summary
The project's financial view shows four numbers:
| Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Budget | The summed budget lines |
| Committed | Purchase orders (any status except draft or cancelled) plus approved change orders |
| Actual | Approved or paid invoices plus project expenses |
| Remaining | Budget minus actual |
The gap between committed and budget is your remaining room; the gap between actual and committed is work not yet billed - both worth watching.
Two things deliberately don't flow in here: costs on linked work orders (those post to the assets, not the project - see Tasks & milestones), and task hours. If money should show in the project's numbers, record it as an invoice or expense.
A vendor spend summary breaks the same actuals down by vendor, and the financial tab includes an in-app "How financial tracking works" explainer.
Change orders
Scope changes get recorded as change orders: description, amount, a cost category, and a status that moves draft → submitted → approved (or rejected). An approved change order raises committed cost - it does not rewrite the budget figure, so the original approved budget stays visible and the pressure shows up as committed closing in on budget.
Cost snapshots
A cost snapshot freezes the financial picture at a moment - total budget, actual cost, percent complete, and forecasted cost - and keeps it. Snapshots are currently created via the API and MCP tools rather than an in-app button - a scheduled AI workflow that snapshots every active project monthly is a natural fit. Snapshot at every board report and you can later reconstruct what was known when.
Where project money meets the portfolio
Because projects are scoped to assets, capital spend lands in the story of the things it renewed - and an active project's budget counts as Committed funding in the Capital Brief's funding gap, split across the system classes and networks it's linked to. Capital and O&M stay separable - but on the same records.
Programmatic access
Budget items, change orders, POs, invoices, time entries, and snapshots are all exposed through the REST API and MCP tools - a monthly AI-drafted variance summary is a natural workflow.