When I find good articles and blogs, that may help our budget4cast clients, I love to pass these along. Here is a great article on defining a Construction Project Budget. It has some useful tips (excerpts below) for building out the structure of your project budget. Please feel free to comment below, if this is of value, or if you would prefer other or additional topics.
Of course, our construction project budget app, budget4cast.com, is an awesome tool to make creation, management, and reporting of your project budget simpler and more efficient. If you have any questions on how to take advantage of our cloud-based budget software, please send us a message. Or just dive in and create your own free trial project, and get going. See for yourself why our current clients report a 60-70% reduction in effort managing their construction project budgets.
The article references some good general steps for putting together a construction project budget. (It is written around residential construction, to some degree, but still some value.) Here are just a few:
2. Look at the plans and list out all the trades and scopes that will be needed for the project. You’ll then want to use that list to set up your budget spreadsheet or enter it into your estimating software.
3. Once you have all of the scopes listed, put together a rough schedule with anticipated durations for each of them. This will give you an idea of how long the total project will take and will determine the amount of supervision and general conditions costs that need to be included.
10. Have one or two people who are familiar with the project review your budget. Tell them you need them to ask you questions about anything that looks out of place. Take any feedback you get and revise the budget accordingly.