Managing project budgets shouldn’t start spiraling in between disconnected, siloed apps or complex financial tools. For those teams already working on projects in Jira, the challenge lies in keeping costs, time, and performance data connected and visible to everyone. In this post, you’ll learn about practical ways to map budgets and costs, establish what you want to spend, and what you are actually spending, aligning money to projects and teamwork, turning project budgeting and costs into accurate financial decisions.
Financial guides for project budgeting are often useful but heavy; the same happens with software supporting those practices. As teams that prefer to advance from an agile perspective, those teams managing projects or programs need something simpler, practical, and straightforward to connect spending costs to projects.
However, keeping track of the work in progress can be overwhelming, depending on the project, and going one level up, depending on the project portfolio being managed.
As this is difficult already, keeping decisions visible and synced across the project team, and spotting budget overruns at a simple glance before they escalate, it's challenging.
Having in place a solution that helps you centralize this information, build and map budgets and costs, and manage them in Jira to sync work, it's a time and productivity booster like no other.
Planning project budgets simply
...in a way teams can actually use...
The best way to kick off a good project budget, planning it, and executing it, it's by summarizing it in paragraphs in a document, a wiki (Confluence in this case), explaining why each tactic exists and how they work.
Learn about the Teamwork Collection and why it's useful in this case >>
The problem starts when translating all this strategy into the Atlassian app, where the project work happens: Jira. Once the projects are rolling, some common questions arise:
- Where are you supposed to keep track of costs?
- How to categorize them?
- Is it possible to establish the budget planned and compare it with what we’re currently spending?
- Which costs or budgets are linked to which project or work item in Jira? Is there traceability?
- Who’s in charge of this cost or this entire budget?
Having a current and unified view of your project budgets you can trust, and it’s visible for the whole team, is a must to align your budgets, costs, projects, and tasks, especially if everything is happening in the same place. This way, you’ll be avoiding siloed tools, time wasted, null visibility, and getting lost from confusion to confusion.
How to properly plan, act, work, and sync projects and budgets in the same tool
The right path to keep budgets and your team synced in the same place, reduces to the app you are using, and the one that gives you that functionality. That’s why let’s review what that app should contain, accompanied by best practices alongside them:
- Document everything at the beginning
When establishing project budgets, creating agreements it’s a must. This document will outline when, how, and why your team intends to achieve project goals. It’s important to establish it, and write down the numbers, which in definitive will ultimately be the main driver of the project regarding the budget.
Establishing volumes, unit costs, and the delivery process is not a prediction on how the project is going to go; it’s a declaration of intentions that leverages the project that later in the development process will have a place to land comfortably or not.
Having these elements in place, explicitly, and available to every team stakeholder, will drive budget conversations from opinions to common goals, converting stakeholders into guardians of the budget.
Besides establishing a budget, forecast it, and document it. This will lead to achieving a healthy project budget.
- Record and track project budget costs
As the project starts and budget costs start happening, those need to be recorded. If they can be in the same place as those budgets are established and forecasted, even more convenient.
Keeping that project budget data categorized will make it easier to audit project development as it happens, allowing instant insights about consumed vs. remaining budgets and costs, making project monthly reviews quicker and available at a simple glance, making it easier to choose when to do what and when.
- Focus on performance and on-time adjustments
It’s important to focus on two aspects: (1) the performance view of your budgets, which shows whether the project is healthy or not, and (2) the operational view.
Having a macro understanding of your projects based on two standards can be made based on two widely common financial standards: (1) Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and (2) Operating Expenses (OPEX). These two categorizations will standardize and share the project track record of expenses across the budget.
Learn how to get the most out of CAPEX & OPEX tracking in Jira >>
These and other custom standards (e.g., labor, vendors, tools, travel, etc.) vary from companies, eliminating the classic surprise: “We look fine on paper, but the account is tight this month.”
- Centralize the project work
Having the financial management on a different, disconnected app, away from where the project development happens, splits the story across tasks and owners. As Jira is usually the common work area to develop projects, integrating budget information there brings everyone together, and sitting budget and cost data next to work items, Spaces (formerly projects), and epics creates a better project synergy.
Learn why Atlassian changed Jira Projects to Jira Spaces >>
If your team logs time when working in Jira, it’s a great practice to get labor cost from Jira worklogs automatically, so month‑end isn’t a scavenger hunt anymore, but that data is available where the work happens, transparent to everyone.
- Calculate the variance in a simple way
Understanding that in the first step, you have already forecasted your budgets, and later on, based on your current spending standard across different project budgets, calculate the variance, it's easy by making a simple calculation.
This is especially relevant when your budget scope shifts from one to another, including the forecast. The variance can turn into a scale or a tool that warns when you’re hitting the red lines. On one way or another. e.g.: “Vendor costs will exceed the maximum in June,” instead of waiting for the project post‑mortem, you’re instantly able to adjust almost in real time, as the project budget is still alive and running. Corrective actions are the way to go.
- Get budget health checks to protect project momentum
As well as project needs periodical meetings and check-ups (dailies, weeklies, etc), it’s also important to include the financial aspects of it. Budgets should have a short, repeatable rhythm. Once a month, minimum, depending on the cadence of the project (or projects, depending on your project management team, PMO, or Program’s office). Looking at the budget, checking on the current situation, and forecasting their development.
A healthy check comprises at least answering these three main questions:
- What moved?
- Why did it move?
- What actions are we taking to keep progressing? (cutting or shifting).
Keeping the answers to those questions brief and actionable is key. This will save hundreds of headaches in later debates and audits.
- Ownership beats the odds
Ownership is very important. When action is needed, a simple approval will keep the project budget in place. Writing down vendors' reviews and how exceptions are handled is key. There’s no heavy process needed beyond a wiki (the same one used in the beginning to document the project budget).
- Map your next moves in a simple way
To keep advancing coherently and connecting your costs and budgets to Work Items and Spaces in Jira, alongside categories, you will get great context about project spending and forecasts for similar projects in the future.
Besides, if you consider a solution that centralizes all this data, and you want to take advantage of it, Budgety for Jira, part of the PMO Collection for Jira, is a collection of solutions alongside Projectrak, Allocaty, and Exporter, which particularly allows you to do all of what we just explained.
Besides, you can make he most out of key native integrations, especially when it comes to the logged work time following Timetracker’s which allows you to easily calculate labor and cost, which basically will roll up on their own. Besides, you can create further detailed reports with eazyBI.
Let the numbers lead the way
Your job it’s just to procure your project is following the marked roadmap established with the right apps. Establishing this way of leading your project budget, you’ll get less arguing based on opinions, and unify a front of decision making based on data, allowing better/solid outcomes, making your future budget planning and forecasting more accurate on different projects, making your job more precise, and choosing better your next move.
Numbers support the story instead of drowning it. The budget becomes what it should be: a practical tool for running projects, not a quarterly performance.