How to Track a Target Budget in Project Insight

A target budget allows project managers to track an original budgeted value at a high level without creating a detailed project schedule or task-level budget. This can be useful when an organization wants to establish a financial target for a project and compare actual performance against that target over time.

What Is a Target Budget?

A target budget is a manually entered budget value that represents the expected cost or financial target for a project.

Unlike detailed project budgeting, a target budget is not calculated from:

• Task estimates
• Resource assignments
• Time entries
• Expense entries
• Actual project costs

Instead, it serves as a simple high-level budget amount that can be used for reporting, forecasting discussions, and budget comparisons.

Why Use a Target Budget?

Organizations often need a way to capture an original budget before detailed planning has been completed.

A target budget can help teams:

• Track the original approved budget for a project
• Record a high-level financial target during project intake
• Compare actual costs against the original budget
• Monitor budget performance over time
• Report on budget targets across projects and portfolios

Some organizations also use the target budget field to track revised budget expectations or forecast values entered by a project manager.

Entering a Target Budget

When the Project Budgeting Add-on is enabled, project managers can enter a target budget value on the project's Budget tab.

The value is entered manually and remains independent of project schedules, resource plans, time entries, and expense tracking.

This allows teams to maintain a high-level budget target even when detailed financial planning is not available.

Using Target Budgets with Project Requests

Target budget values can be captured during the project request process.

When a project is created from a project request, the target budget can be transferred to the resulting project, helping maintain continuity between intake, approval, and execution.

Reporting on Target Budgets

Target budget information can be included in Project Insight reports.

This allows organizations to review and compare:

• Target budgets
• Actual project costs
• Budget performance across projects
• Portfolio-level budget information

By combining target budget reporting with other project financial data, organizations can gain visibility into how projects are performing against their original financial goals.