Cost Management

Transparent cost management helps you keep track of the financial development of a project and identify deviations between planned and actual costs at an early stage.

In smenso, you can define a project budget and record plan and actual costs for tasks. Folders and Flavors can also be used to structure and evaluate costs.

Define the project budget

The Budget is entered in the project master data and defines the financial framework for the entire project.

It can later be compared with the planned and actual costs when evaluating the project.

Record plan and actual costs in tasks

The Plan cost field allows you to define the costs planned for individual tasks. The value can be entered manually or calculated automatically based on the planned effort and the hourly rate stored in the project.

The costs actually incurred are shown in the Actual cost field. These can also be entered manually or calculated automatically based on the actual effort.

This allows you to compare planned and actual costs at task level and identify deviations.

You can find more information about the plan/actual fields here:

Plan/actuals fields of a task 

Structure costs

For more detailed evaluations, you can structure your costs further. Folders and Flavors, for example, can be used for this purpose.

With a Flavor such as Cost type, you can assign tasks to different cost types. The structure that works best depends on your project and the evaluations you want to perform.

The start and due dates of tasks can also be used to take the timing of costs into account.

Evaluate project costs

In the project status, you can use various widgets to evaluate the cost development of your project.

The Costs Status widget compares the project budget with the total plan and actual costs of all tasks. This gives you an at-a-glance view of how planned and actual costs are developing in relation to the available budget.

You can find more information about the available widgets and where they can be used here:

Widgets in the Project Overview 

Widgets: Overview, Customize & areas of use 

Best Practice

For effective cost management, we recommend:

• defining a realistic project budget,
• maintaining plan costs for relevant tasks,
• updating actual costs regularly throughout the project,
• structuring costs with folders or Flavors where appropriate, and
• comparing plan and actual costs regularly.

This gives you a transparent overview of your project's cost development and helps you identify deviations at an early stage.