The manual budget calculation mode is particularly valuable for projects:
- with variable or unpredictable costs
- requiring frequent financial adjustments
- demanding hands-on financial management
- requiring clear visibility into how funds are allocated
- with other specific demands
This mode allows you to enter cost data directly into the Budget and Actual cost fields 1, and also modify and delete it for each task. Thus, you don't have to set up resource values and estimate task duration and effort to get the calculations. Just input any number based on your calculations.
In manual mode, the only calculations performed automatically are the total budget and the actual costs for a summary task and the entire project 2. These totals are derived from the sums of the values you manually enter into the Budget and Actual cost fields. This data can’t be edited.
By default, any newly created project applies manual budget calculation. To check the current settings or switch between calculation modes:
1 Go to Project settings.
2 Disable the toggle for Manual budget calculation mode. Enable the Auto budget calculation toggle for automatic calculation.
When you switch from automatic to manual budget calculation mode and there are already automatically calculated values in the Budget and Actual cost fields, you have two options:
- Check the box ‘Reset saved budget values’ to clear all existing values from the fields.
- Leave the box unchecked to retain existing values in the fields.
Note that this selection only affects the Budget and Actual cost fields. Cost values assigned to resources in the People tab during automatic mode are preserved regardless. Although these values are not visible or editable in manual mode, they will remain unchanged if you switch from automatic to manual mode and back.
These actions are also logged in the History of changes, so you can always check them and restore, if necessary.
Keep in mind that the budget calculation mode is set individually for each project. It does not apply universally across all projects in the account.