New budget capabilities in Husky

A bird's eye view of what's new:

1. Tags at costs
2. Filter options: by project groups, project managers and cost managers, and tags
3. New charts for budget and monthly expenditure
4. Differences between expected costs/invoices with budget, in graphs, progress bars and hard data
5. Plan and project group limits
6. Quickly add invoices
7. Easier adding of new financial years
8. All budget: for those who have more than one plan to manage, it all comes together here
9. Clarification of budget at multi-channel moments
10. Improved export to Excel with clear distinction between budgets, costs, invoices and the monthly communication budget

Simply too much for just one blog post. Below we have clarified the most important novelties. Or dive into our Help Centre if you want to know more about certain topics.

The new Budget module is immediately available to everyone. You don't have to do anything to activate it. If you have questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact your Support manager.

How to budget?

Budgeting should never be just a financial report of what you have spent, because then you only look back. You should also dare to look ahead and list what you expect to spend. The difference between the two offers the necessary room for manoeuvre for the marketer.

You can budget in different ways:

• leave at a high level and refine gradually (top-down)
• or start at the details and see what you need to make it all possible (bottom-up)

Top-down budgeting

You set a limit per plan and per project group. You do that at Budget. For example, your planning limit can be 10% of the company's turnover. You assign 25% of your planning limit to the Events project group.
Then you enter project budgets. Here you will gradually discover how much budget is still available in relation to the project group limit or the planning limit. Then you can refine each project with costs.

Bottom-up budgeting

You start with the costs within a project and discover what you need to make a project succeed. This is how you arrive at totals for project groups and the complete plan. You can then set limits around that. For startups and smaller companies this is often the desired approach. They try to spend as little budget as possible and therefore start from what is absolutely necessary.

Estimated costs

Important in our budget module is the distinction between estimated costs and effective expenditure, the invoices. If you organise an event, catering will be a cost, for example. You estimate that cost, according to your experience as a marketer or on the basis of a quotation by your supplier. If you do that for all the costs, you will get to know the project budget or you will know if the planned project budget is sufficient and where you may have to make adjustments.

You have not spent a single cent on determining your costs. That changes when you start to receive invoices. You add these to the correct cost, so you can check whether your expenses are in line with what you expected. This way you get the marketing budget under control.

You should always compare expected costs and invoices with the project budget.

• The available budget between expected costs and the project budget tells you how much you can still plan.
• The available budget between invoices and the project budget tells you how much you can still spend, because it is not because you have planned something, that you will actually spend it. So you can use the budget for which you have not yet received invoices for other actions.

In Husky we make it possible for you to both budget and keep track of invoices. Moreover, you can grow in it. You can start with a certain part and gradually use it more intensively. The more you apply, the better you are managing your budget. How do we do that?

• You can enter invoices without estimating the costs, leaving them at 0. You have to create at least one cost per project. If necessary, this can be the general costs 'Invoices'.
• You can estimate costs without entering invoices if you only want to use Husky for budgeting.
• Project budgets may be set to 0 if you mainly want to report what the expenses are per project, without having to stick a target figure on it.
• You don't have to use project group limits and plan limits either.

Automated costs for channels

If you assign budgets to moments in your communication calendar, these costs will automatically be made in the Budget of your project. The costs are the totals per channel. For example, within a project you have the 'Facebook ads' channel and you place all your sponsored posts on it, each with their own advertising budget. In your Budget, the cost 'Facebook ads' will appear automatically with the total of all those moments. 

Moreover, the cost will also include the tags that are determined at the level of the communication channel. If that channel 'Facebook ads' had the tag 'social ads', this also applies to the linked costs. If you do this in multiple projects, you can see a total of all social ads and in which projects this type of cost appears.

When filtering tags, we always use the waterfall system. First we check if a project has a certain tag. If so, all costs in that project are included. If not, we look for specific costs with that tag and only those costs are added up. If a cost has the same tag as the project, it is of course also included, just like all other costs within that project.

Better understanding of the budget

It is easy to display figures in tables. It becomes a bit more difficult to deal meaningfully with those figures. How do we meet this challenge?

• New budget chart that shows you the relationship between the project budget, the expected costs and the invoices. If you look at that at the level of a complete plan, you can also see how the totals relate to the limits. If you use filters, you will see the ratio to the totals.
• Progress bars in relation to the project budgets. At a glance you can see which projects are over budget, or where you still expect invoices. Hover your mouse over the progress bar and you will get more information about the concrete figures. If you want to see the figures immediately, you can adjust the view (in Filters) so that you see the differences instead of the progress bars.
  
• New invoice chart with monthly expenses. A bar chart shows you when the invoices were booked in.
  
• Clarification of the use of budget at multichannel moments. If you link your moments to other channels, you have to take into account that the budget only comes from one project. If not, budgets are double counted. In projects and channels with multichannel moments it is now clearer to see where it is going.
  

If you want to make your own graphs or calculations, you can export all the data to an Excel file and indulge yourself completely.