Creating and Viewing Periodic Budgets

Budgeting is important for both cost control and financial planning. Choosing to set up a periodic, over Life-of-Matter or Phased, budget gives you more granularity and better visibility over where your spend is allocated. You also have the ability to run a Matter budget vs. spend budget report on these budget styles. See here

You can set up a matter budget in a variety of ways:

Phased Budgets

For more information on Phased Budgets, visit this help article: Creating & Viewing Phased Budgets

Periodic Budgets

Via budget requests from your vendors or via the steps in this article.

**Essential Reading**

For a detailed list of all budget types available on Brightflag, please refer to the following help articles:

• Overview of Budgeting
• Where do matter budgets appear in Brightflag?
• Estimating a Matter Budget
• Setting & Viewing Financial Budgets
• Interpreting the Results of your Financial Budgets
• Manually Reviewing Budget Requests

Creating a periodic budget:

1. Find the relevant matter and click into the matter.
2. Navigate to the Budgets tab.
3. If a budget does not exist for the matter, click Add a Budget. If a budget already exists, you can edit or delete the budget by clicking Edit Budgets.
4. Choose Monthly, Fiscal Quarter, or Fiscal Year as your budget style.
5. Choose a start month and end month.
6. Enter a budget total. If you’d prefer, leave this blank and build your budget from scratch on the next page.
   • This is based on the matter currency. If the matter currency is incorrect, change the currency on the matter details page prior to setting the budget.
7. If relevant, set an unassigned budget. This is also known as an internal or buffer budget. Your vendors won’t see this. If this isn't relevant to your matter, set $0 or 0% for this value.
8. Click Next.
9. You will now see that your budget is evenly split across the vendors on your matter. Change the vendor totals as you see fit. You can do this by clicking on the relevant cell, entering a new amount, and clicking the tick button.
10. If you would like to set different amounts for each month, click breakdown to expand the view and edit the cells in the same way.
11. If you have made some mistakes, you can click reset changes at the bottom of the grid. This resets all changes that were made on the current screen.
12. Click add FY, FQ or month to increase the time for this budget. You cannot add a period to the start of the budget, so if you need to change this you will need to delete the budget and start over.
13. Click remove FY, FQ or month to delete the latest period on the budget. If a period in the middle of the budget is expected to have no spend, enter $0 in that cell.
14. Click save in the top right corner. Enter a comment which will be saved in the budget changes table. Comments will only be visible internally. Vendors will not be notified when you set the budget. They will only see their portion of the budget. Finally, click confirm changes.

Editing a periodic budget:

1. Navigate to the Budgets tab.
2. Click edit budgets.
3. You will be able to edit anything on your budget as per steps 9-15 above.
4. In addition, you can now delete a budget entirely. Deleted budgets will still be logged for future reference in the budget changes grid.

Viewing a Periodic Budget

FAQs

Should I update my budget regularly?

Over time, as your matter progresses we advise that you update your budget as more information is learned. Part of this is reducing your unassigned closer to $0 as the risks and unknowns reduce. You can monitor changes to the budget in the budget changes table [link]. This helps ensure the budget isn’t constantly increasing as the matter progresses.

Which date types are used for the budget charts?

The pending and approved figures can be based on either the invoice dates or billing period dates.