Advanced Project Budgets provides several key benefits. For one thing, it allows you to set up a work breakdown structure, or WBS, for your projects. This means that you can define the hierarchical relationships within your projects. This feature also (as the name suggests), provides advanced budgeting capabilities. It allows you to budget effectively for the various stages within each project, helping you keep up with each project’s cost and revenue throughout the timeframe of the project. You can even create multiple budgets for a project and compare each of the different budget versions. A third benefit is that when this feature is enabled, you can use activity codes to track data across multiple projects and customers.
Once you’ve enabled the Advanced Project Budgets feature, NetSuite adds the Work Breakdown Structure tab to project records. On this tab, you’ll see the New WBS button.
Clicking this button will open up the Work Breakdown Structure page, where you will define your WBS for this project. At the top of this page, you’ll see a chart that tracks your estimates vs. actuals for the project. Once you define the WBS and start tracking costs and revenues on the project, this chart will begin displaying the comparative data.
Then, if you scroll down to the end of the page, you’ll be able to start adding work items to your WBS. These work items help to break down the project into its individual parts. For each work item, you can connect it to a project task and an activity code, and NetSuite will display associated costs and revenues for each work item.
Once you save the WBS page, you’ll be able to view the complete schedule on the Work Breakdown Structure tab of the project record.
Once you have tagged your WBS work items with specific tasks and activity codes, you can connect those same tasks and codes on transactions or time entries that are related to the project. Then, the related work items on your WBS will automatically update to reflect the actual costs and revenues for the project.
After creating the WBS for a project, turning it into a budget is simple. On the Work Breakdown Structure page, you’ll see the Set as Baseline Budget button. Selecting this button will prompt NetSuite to copy the WBS over to a budget record that will be connected to the project.
Now, you’ll be able to view this budget under the Budget tab on the project record.