Streamlining Budget Approval Processes: Automating Workflow with Project Budgeting

As automation becomes smarter, companies of all sizes will have more opportunities to use them in their work.?

Automation clearly saves time and money by making repeated tasks easier.

But interestingly, even though automation is becoming more popular, many people are worried. Not about tools taking their jobs but about helpfully using the new tech.

A recent study showed that 91% of small businesses are considering using automation or smart tools to outperform their competitors in the next year.?

At the same time, 67% of those small businesses said they are not confident they can keep up with these tech trends.

That means more people than ever want to use automation in their business, but they feel intimidated to do so.

One area where automation can make a big difference is managing project budgets.?

By using easy automation tools that don't need coding, project managers can solve various problems that naturally come up with any new project budget.

Understanding Project Budget Management

Budget management is the financial plan that describes and shows the expected costs of all the activities needed to finish the project. This includes materials, people, technology, and more.

Managing the project budget is the process of creating, following, and changing the budget to increase profits while maintaining good quality.?

If you don't monitor the project budget closely, you can easily anger clients or reduce your profits.?

For these reasons, budget management is one of the most important skills for any good project manager.

How Can Automation Help With Budget Management?

In any business and even daily life, making all the necessary costs fit into a set amount of money can be hard.?

With project management, how well you stay on budget mostly decides whether or not the project is a success.

For this reason, it's easy to understand why budget management practices are very important for both the total cost of the project and the chances of success.

Automation can help make the budget management process better by solving these problems:

1. Administrative Burden

Even with all the software tools they have, project managers and their teams still get stuck with a lot of administrative work. Project budgeting and tracking are no exception.

For example, you'll have to create a new budget every time you start a new project. This means entering lots of numbers by hand and pulling information from different places.?

Automation can eliminate this repetitive work by automatically filling in critical data from your customer database, contracts, resource management, and more.

Project managers need to know what's happening right now to make good financial decisions as the project progresses. When you realize your team needs an additional 15 hours on a task, for example, it may be too late.??

The key is to have up-to-date time and expense data. Automation tools can help by bringing data into your view as it happens. This goes for every dollar spent and every hour tracked.

You can also set up this data in any format you want. For budget management, it's recommended to have budgets vs actuals, billable utilization, and capacity always visible.

2.? Budget Overspending

No one wants their project to go wrong, but it happens, even with the most experienced and skilled teams.

Automation tools like Workstatus can help you spot budget problems before they even happen.

With predictive analysis, you can automatically figure out at which point(s) the project may be in danger of going over budget based on measurements of money and time.?

Your software can learn how to identify this from past projects and from basic budget calculations compared to your current spending.

3. Alerts & Notifications

One of the most common ways businesses and people use automation in daily life is with alerts.?

To manage a project budget, you can set automated alerts for various situations that may need attention. This can really help prevent overspending.

For example, you can create an alert when your budget is close to a certain limit or automatically send a message to employees who need to submit their expense information.

Top 7 Ways To Automate Project Budgeting Workflow?

Automation is here to stay, and smart machines and other automation tools are now being used by project managers to increase the profits of their projects.?

Here are the most common ways you can use automation for budget management, specifically to help keep your projects on the right path:

1. Make Use Of Templates

Use pre-made designs whenever possible to avoid the tiresome administrative work of starting a new project and budget.

Most budget management tools provide pre-made designs for projects and budgets to help you save time.?

You can use these designs as-is or create your own based on a previous project budget.

If your project management tool connects with your customer database, you can even automatically fill in many of the budget details from data already in your deal.

2.?Capacity Planner

Projects can easily go wrong for small teams when they work more than they can handle.?

A capacity planner is a great way to use automation for budget tracking, especially if you charge by the hour.

Tools like Workstatus connect with your team's time-tracking information so you can see where everyone stands in relation to their workload at any given time.?

With Workstatus's easy-to-use time tracking, you'll have accurate data to feed into the capacity planner.

Before someone gets overloaded, you'll be able to anticipate burnout and make changes to make sure tasks are completed on time and within budget.

3. Analytics & Dashboards

To manage your budget, you need to understand where and how money is being used at any given time.?

With automation features, you can quickly see all important project tracking information.

In addition to straight numbers like budgets vs actuals, you can automatically generate reports on measurements like billable utilization and see those numbers in a simple dashboard.

The idea is to be able to understand the critical numbers you want to see in a neat, visual format that won't overload your brain.?

This makes the dashboard one of the strongest tools for project managers who need to monitor their budgets constantly.

4. Expense Prediction

Let me give you an example of how predictive analysis works.?

You'll find that certain automated money-tracking solutions can automatically predict expense data and sort it into categories.

This helps the finance department save time, and this feature goes beyond just automation.

In this situation, the software learns from all your previous financial information to accurately sort future amounts into the right expense and tax accounts.

5. Automated Notifications

Automated alerts are a great way to manage a project budget, and you can use them in a few different situations.?

One of the more prominent examples is overspending on the budget, where you can set up an alert for when time or money is at a certain limit.

But there are other automated alerts you can use, too.?

You can create these alerts very quickly. For instance, you can set alerts to notify you when someone has reached their weekly workload limit.?

You can also automatically remind team members to submit their time and expenses.

6. Automatic Total Adjustment

Budget-tracking solutions and most project management tools will automatically change the total amounts when you go in and edit items in the budget.?

It's a simple automation but still makes life easier for project managers.

7. Auto-Reconciliation

Auto-reconciliation is a feature offered by various money-tracking solutions to improve your budget management.?

It speeds up the bookkeeping process by automatically comparing your financial information with what's in your accounting tool and checking for any issues.?

This is another example of how automation can remove extra costly steps in maintaining the financial health of projects.

Closing Thoughts

Automation can help solve many problems that naturally occur during budget management.?

This technology makes repeated tasks easier, which helps track and oversee the budget.

Automation solves common budget management issues by providing relief from administrative work, up-to-date information, protections against overspending, and custom reminders.????????

Use the latest automation in your project management and/or budget-tracking software to boost your budget management and increase project profits.

Thanks for reading!???