Creating and Viewing Phased Budgets: for Brightflag Customers (Clients)

**Essential Reading**

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

• Overview of Budgeting
• Budget Requests - All You Need To Know
• 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 phased 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 Phased as your budget type.
   
   
5. Click add phase and begin entering a phase name. 
• We encourage you to use consistent phase names where possible to help your vendors understand what they relate to [link]. As you begin typing the phase name, similar names that have been used on before will be available for your selection. When you have finished entering the phase name, click add phase or hit enter.
6. Add as many phases as you would like, bearing in mind that your vendors’ invoices can only have 1 phase at a time.
   
   
7. Enter a budget total. 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.
   
   
8. 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.
   
   
9. Double-check your entries and then click Next.
   
   
10. You will now see that the non-unassigned part of 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.
    
    
11. If you would like to set different amounts for each month, click monthly breakdown to expand the view and edit the cells in the same way.
    
    
12. 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.
    
    
13. Click add month to increase the time for this budget. 
• (You cannot add a month to the start of the budget, so if you need to change this you will need to delete the budget and start over).
14. Click remove month to delete the latest month on the budget. If a month in the middle of the budget is expected to have no spend, enter $0 for that month.
    
    
15. When you are happy with your budget, choose your default view. This defines the default filtering for your budget charts. The options are matter total (which ignores dates), current fiscal month, current fiscal quarter, and current fiscal year.
    
    
16. 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 phased 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 Phased Budget