RAVE’s financial management system is designed to help you manage all the financial aspects of your projects including budgeting, bills, and invoices with ease.
Accessing your Project’s Budget Workflows
You can access your Project’s financial workflows from either the Financial button, or the Site|Build button's Build Project list, clicking on the project’s job number, and finally the Budget sub-tab.
This will display the project’s Financial Management Systems workflows – all laid out in an easy and logical order, starting with:
- Creating a preliminary budget
- Sending your quote and tender requests out
- Managing your quotes and tenders received in
- Building up a full client estimate or proposal
- Creating purchase orders - if you use them
- Receiving bills in
- And sending client invoices out
The Preliminary Budget sub-tab
This is where you would go to create a very quick project budget with the option of margin or markup.
NOTE: This is not a QS document or a client estimate/quote but basically a way for you to create a quick budget to give either yourself or your client an idea of what this job would cost.
Creating a Preliminary Budget
To create a new Preliminary Budget:
- We select the categories to be added to our budget, via the top ‘Add a Category’ button
- Select the category from the pop-up’s ‘Estimate Category’ dropdown
- Adding in an approximate value to the ‘Budgeted Amount’ field
- Then click ‘Add Category’
As you load your categories and pricing in, you’ll see your totals to the right of each line and an updated subtotal. As you can see in the example below we’ve added $5000 for Prelim and General, $25,000 for Architect/Design and $10000 for Engineering and Inspections giving a total of $40,000.
NOTE: If you don't already have your categories set up in RAVE, you can add these as required by going to your profile dropdown, selecting Estimate Category, clicking the Add New button, giving the category a name, and clicking save. The new categories will be added to the bottom of the list, these can be rearranged up or down via the hamburger bars to the left of the category name.
Adding your Margin to a Preliminary Budget
We can easily add a margin to our prelim budget, and RAVE will automatically calculate the markup, and additional breakdown of costs. In this example I’ve added a 20% margin, RAVE automatically calculates this out as a 25% markup. So:
- We have our raw cost, or subtotal, of $40,000 – which is the cost to you excluding GST
- Our 20% margin, or 25% markup, of $10,000 – which again excludes GST
- The GST component of $7500
- Creating a total sell price to the client of $57,500 – including GST
If you don't need a category line in your preliminary budget, you can remove it by clicking the red minus circle.
To Generate a Preliminary Budget proposal
We can click on the ‘Generate Prelim Budget’ button, to create a pdf document of this budget for your client.
The preliminary Budget includes your logo, the job information, the category name(s), your cost, margin, GST, and the total sell price.
NOTE: As the Preliminary Budget proposal includes your costs and margin, this budget is only suitable for your own reference, or your ‘open book + margin’ client projects.
Reviewing your Preliminary Budget on the Back Costing sub-tab
Moving over to the project’s “Back Costing” sub-tab, you will notice that the little “Budget” tab allows you to compare your preliminary budget with your actual quoted amount, and with what your purchase orders and bills totals are. As a result, it gives you a really good indication of how your original preliminary budget went versus what you actually ended up spending. We dive deeper into the Back Costing reports in the RAVE FMS Back Costing sub-tab section.
NOTE: If you’ve deleted all of your preliminary budget categories, you’ll have no data to compare in the Back Costing report, and in this case the Budget tab will be greyed out.
