Understanding Budgets
How GoCrew compares planned spending to actual costs — categories, thresholds, and states.
A project's budget is a set of planned amounts, one per spending category. As work happens, actual costs accumulate from work order time logs and material entries, and GoCrew compares the two continuously.
The categories
| Category | What it covers | Actual costs |
|---|---|---|
| Labor | Crew hours on work orders | Accrue automatically from time logs |
| Materials | Parts and consumables used on work orders | Accrue automatically from material entries |
| Subcontractor | Outsourced work you plan for | Budget-only today — no actuals accrue |
| Overhead | Planned overhead you want to carry in the budget | Budget-only today — no actuals accrue |
Reading the Budget vs Actual table
The project page shows one row per category with:
- Budget — the planned amount (empty if the category has no budget line).
- Actual — the cost accrued so far.
- Variance — budget minus actual. Positive means you have room left; negative means you've overspent that line.
- % Used — actual as a share of budget.
- Status — one of the states below.
The four cost states
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| OK | Actual costs are within your warn threshold. |
| Warn | Costs have crossed the category's warn threshold (default 80% of budget). |
| Alert | Costs have crossed the alert threshold (default 100% of budget) — the category is over budget. |
| Budget only | The category has a budget but no actual costs. Subcontractor and Overhead always look like this today, since no actuals accrue for them. |
A project is flagged over budget when any of its categories is at Alert. The dashboard's "Over budget" panel and the cost summary surface those projects first.
Thresholds
Every budget line carries two thresholds:
- Warn at — default 0.8 (80% of the budget).
- Alert at — default 1.0 (100% of the budget).
You set them when creating the budget line and can adjust them when revising the budget. Thresholds are fractions of the line's budget, not currency.
Crossing a threshold notifies the project's managers — see Budget notifications.
Costs never change retroactively
Labor is priced at the team member's hourly rate at the moment the time is logged, and materials are priced at the part's standard cost at the moment of use. Later changes to a person's rate or a part's cost never rewrite past entries — your cost history stays as it was recorded. Corrections are possible, but they are deliberate actions with an audit trail; see Correcting cost entries.