Overview

Tracking your project budget in monday.com helps you stay on top of expenses, manage costs, and ensure financial alignment with project goals. With a few simple steps, you can turn any monday board into a dynamic budget tracker that monitors actual vs. planned costs in real time.

This guide will walk you through:

• Setting up budget columns
• Automating calculations
• Visualizing budget data
• Tips for staying within budget

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🧱 Step 1: Set Up Your Budget Tracker Board

Start by creating a new board or using an existing project management board.

📋 Suggested Column Setup:

Column Type	Column Name	Purpose
Text / Name	Expense Item	Describe the cost item
Dropdown	Category	Group by type (e.g., software, labor, marketing)
People	Owner	Assign responsibility for budget line
Date	Due Date	Timeline for the expense
Numbers	Budgeted Cost	Planned amount
Numbers	Actual Cost	What was actually spent
Formula	Variance	Auto-calculate overspend or savings

💡 Use Groups to separate phases, months, or categories (e.g., Q1, Q2, etc.)

🧮 Step 2: Add Budget Calculations with a Formula Column

Add a Formula Column to automatically track variance:

Formula Example:

{Actual Cost} – {Budgeted Cost}

You can rename the column to “Variance” or “Over/Under”.

✅ A positive number = overspent
✅ A negative number = savings

📊 Step 3: Visualize Your Budget with Dashboards

Create a dashboard to monitor project financials at a glance.

Recommended Widgets:

Widget	Purpose
Chart	Visualize cost breakdown by category or phase
Battery	Show percentage of total budget used
Numbers	Display totals (e.g., total budgeted vs. actual)
Table	Review detailed expenses across all projects
Text	Add budget notes, summary, or updates

🔗 You can connect this dashboard to multiple boards for multi-project budgeting.

🔁 Step 4: Automate Budget Monitoring

Use automations to stay proactive:

Example Automations:

• 🔔 Notify owner if actual cost exceeds budgeted cost
• ⚠️ Trigger a status change when variance is over a set threshold
• 📅 Remind team of upcoming budget deadlines

📌 Access automations via the Automation Center in your board.

🔗 Step 5: Link to Invoices or Documents

Use these features to track receipts and records:

• File Column to attach invoices or contracts
• Updates Section to add comments, approvals, or documentation
• Status Column to mark payments as pending, approved, or paid

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✅ Best Practices

Tip	Why It Helps
Use consistent naming for categories	Improves filtering and chart clarity
Separate capital vs. operational expenses	Easier reporting
Use conditional coloring	Highlight over-budget items at a glance
Reuse templates	Save time by cloning successful budget boards
Limit editing permissions	Prevent accidental changes to financial data

🔌 Optional: Integrate with Finance Tools

For advanced budget tracking, connect monday.com with:

• QuickBooks / Xero / FreshBooks (via Zapier)
• Excel / Google Sheets for exports and advanced analysis
• Power BI for financial dashboards

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❓FAQs

Can I track budgets across multiple projects?
Yes—use dashboard widgets and connected boards to consolidate and compare project budgets.

Can I create alerts when we go over budget?
Yes—set up custom automations to notify team members or flag items that exceed budget.

How do I share the budget tracker with stakeholders?
Use view-only sharing links, or create a dashboard with permissions limited to summary data.