Budget Spend Plan and Labor Profile

Program Description and User Guidance

About the Budget Spend Plan: The budget spend plan is the most basic, if not primitive, method for tracking project budgets.  It involves use of a graph that shows the cumulative planned spending throughout the project life.  This graph, typically starts and ends with a low slope and ramps up in the middle, resulting in a profile commonly referred to as an "S-curve."  (See illustration.)  This graph illustrates what is sometimes called the project "burn rate."

The second worksheet (tab is "Budget") uses data from the Gantt chart and labor rates for each task to generate a project spend plan.  The next step is to input cumulative actual spending each week, whereupon one can track the budget versus actuals for the project. 

Using the Budget Worksheet:  The second worksheet (tab is "Budget") is a copy of the first worksheet, with cells modified to show the planned labor dollars based on a labor rate for each task.  The monthly calendar has not carried over, as it is too hard to get the cells to line up, and they may change once you modify the date of the first week.  The only place you should enter data on this sheet should be the Labor Rate column. 

Labor costs are accumulated a the bottom of the first page, and then shown graphically.  The data has been fudged to show what is called an S-curve, typical of most labor profiles.   (See graphic on the 2nd worksheet).

The only other place to input data is the "Cumulate Actuals - Manual Entry" line at the bottom of the worksheet.  This is for actual cumulative labor dollars - data that you might obtain from collecting hours and dollars charged to the project.

There is also a row for entering a "Weekly Expense Estimate" where you might add planned travel, expendibles, etc.  You might sum these on another worksheet and then add the totals here.

There are lots of things this spreadsheet won't do, in particular, it can't show the costs of multiple types of labor for the same task.  You can get around this by making parallel tasks for each labor category.  The main drawback is that you can't view your staffing profile by skill type (see next worksheet description).  If you can't live with such limitations, you are probably beyond the point of using EXCEL for project scheduling software.

About the Staffing Profile: The staffing profile has three primary purposes: watch it during your planning process to make sure you have a "reasonable" plan (if your staffing profile looks like Mt. Everest, then you probably need to stretch out your plan; use the staffing profile to give you a hint about when you should be hiring staff; and plot your actual staffing against plan, during the project, to see if you have staffing shortages.

This third worksheet is build from a copy of the second worksheet.  It takes the weekly labor cost per task and backs out the labor dollars, leaving only labor hours per task.   These are then summed to show labor hour per week. 

There is nothing you need to do for this worksheet, except look at the graph, unless you have broken some of the links moving things in the other worksheets.

This is clearly a beta release, at best, so if you get stuck, please don't hesitate to email inquiries to: jim@hyperthot.com    Even if this doesn't work for your project, it should be an excellent learning experience for understanding the concepts related to project planning and resource management.

This page updated November 4, 2004

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