Different types of budgets

There are three different types of budgets you can use in Synergy. The pros and cons are detailed below. As you will see, we recommend you set up a template budget and use this for your future projects.

1. Top-down - generate a budget from the fee

This method automatically generates a sample budget from the fee. For example, you might estimate your fees at 20K and the automatic budget feature will resource this for you with roles and hours that add up to the fee.

“Design a new house? Yeah, we will do that for 20k”

In this method, the budget will split the fee between all your available rates. You can then fine tune this to meet the exact needs of this project.

Use a budget template to do this more accurately and quickly – see method 3.

Use case:Simple jobs where the accuracy of the budget is not important. Future opportunities where you don’t want to spend a lot of time setting it up.

Pros: Very fast, and reasonably accurate.

Cons: It is not as accurate as method 3.

Note: If you are in planning mode and a rate is deleted or hours changed, the fee will also update to reflect the change - the fee, budget and resource plan are linked. To keep the original fee amount, you can either switch it to delivery mode to stop automatically synchronising the budget and fee, or add an extra item into your budget to adjust it to a specific fee value.

2. Bottom up – start from scratch with a budget to calculate the fee

You might know the brief and will build up your fee is based around the work that is required to deliver the project.

Rather than guess a fee, you might prefer to do a more detailed budget, estimating the work that needs to be done, and see what that all adds up to. Then you can be confident that the fee will cover the work, and hopefully a bit left over for profit.

“Can you prepare a budget to include in the tender for the city oval grandstand redevelopment?”

Use case: When you need an accurate fee proposal.

Pros: Accurate

Cons: Time consuming

3. Using a template

This is the fastest and most accurate way to price a job. You should already have templates setup for your different types of jobs. The template will show a typical budget for each project type, set up to a certain value. The magic starts when you drop the template into the budget. You can set the expected target fee, and all the items in the budget will automatically, proportionally adjust to scale to the fee.

Use case: All jobs

Pros: Accurate, customisable and scalable

Cons: Initial setup of the templates takes time