ALM: User Guide

The "Project finance and budget management" module lets you keep a project budget and track how funds are spent. The project budget is made of budget lines, which are of two kinds:

• entered manually
• generated automatically

The following expense lines are generated automatically:

• for time planned on issues, enhancements, and tasks, calculated as the sum of assigned unfinished work, taking into account the planned estimate and the assignee's rate;
• for hours actually spent, calculated as the sum of completed work, taking into account the time actually spent and the assignee's rate.

We provide several standard line types for manual entry, for example "Management expenses" or "Reserve". Budget line types can be configured in the administrative section, Settings — Reference lists (Line type). The "Category" field indicates whether the line is an expense or income.

An employee's hourly cost is set on the user card, on the "Finance" tab. A budget expense line is built from the planned effort estimate of assigned tasks, and also from the time actually spent on completed tasks.

You can bind a budget line to a schedule, which creates recurring income or expenses, for example for rented hardware.

Several budget views are available:

Each project collects a "Project budget" metric, which reflects the current budget amount. The metric can be placed on the dashboard. This metric is shown in the "Projects and activities" module, so budgets can be tracked across projects at a high level of control.

Assignee rates

To set participant rates for a project, use the "Rates" module of the same name. Access to this module depends on the license and on the right to access financial information.

The hourly cost (rate) of an assignee is also set on their account card under Administration — Settings — Users.

Expense breakdown

The system provides modules that break expenses down by requirement and by task:

• Expenses by requirement - the module shows the requirements hierarchy, planned and actual expenses, and planned expenses by the task types linked to the requirement. Use the module to see which amounts are spent on which requirements and kinds of work. Baselines let you track how expenses change from version to version.
• Expenses by task - the module shows planned and actual expenses for a given set of tasks.
• Expenses by issue - the module shows planned expenses for issues by task type, and actual expenses calculated from the time actually spent. This module replaces "Expenses by requirement" in processes that do not use upfront design.
• Expenses by feature - the module shows the total expenses for the requirements (enhancements, stories) linked to a feature.

Access control

Because financial information is usually available only to a limited group of employees, this data can be hidden by configuring access rights:

• At the system level, access can be limited with teams and team access rights for the "Project finance and budget management" module. Employees who belong to a team that is allowed to use this module can see and change the data.
• At the project level, role access rights can limit who can see or edit financial information.