# Budget and cost

Set a budget for the project, enter people’s hourly rates, and record expenses. SmartPM calculates labour costs from logged hours; it displays spent amounts, remaining budget, and billable totals to customers on a single screen.

- Budget tab: only the project manager (financial information is not visible to other members)

- Mark time as billable: the person who entered the time

## Steps

- Open the Budget tab in the project. Fill in the Project budget, Currency and Default hourly rate fields 1; each field saves automatically when you leave the input box.

- The boxes at the top show spent amount (labour and expenses), remaining budget and billable amount 2. The bar shows how much of the budget has been used; it turns yellow at 80% and red when the budget is exceeded.

- In the Labour table, enter the individual hourly rate for persons with different rates 3. If you clear the box, the person reverts to the default rate.

- Add an expense in the Expenses section with date, description, and amount. Check the Billable box for expenses to be passed on to the customer.

> Result: Labour cost is calculated by multiplying every logged duration by the person's hourly rate and updates with each change. The 'Download CSV' summary provides a single Excel file containing labour and expenses per person.

## Billable time

When manually adding time to a card, the Billable box is checked by default; uncheck it for work that will not be passed on to the customer, such as internal meetings. These times are included in the cost but not in the billable amount; "unbilled" appears in the card's time list. Time tracked via the timer is considered billable.

> Tip: You can write amounts in formats like 1.250,50 or 1250.50. If a person without an hourly rate enters a duration, this duration does not contribute to the cost; the tab warns about this, and entering the default hourly rate is sufficient.

## Related pages

- Manually adding duration

- Weekly timesheet