Excel Templates for Tracking Project Costs
Keeping track of project cost over a period of time is a necessity. There are a lot of times when organizations could’ve saved a lot of money if they did properly keep track of their project cost. But they somehow never did it. A large benefit of tracking your project cost is that it allows you to keep your budget under control.
For example suppose you are working on an 8 month project. Then in the third month you spot that the cost is getting out of hand. This will allow you to put the necessary measures in place to fix it. Or make a tough decision to end it because the return on investment isn’t worth it.
Furthermore it can give you the opportunity to take a look at your project at a much deeper level. As a result of this you can spot inefficient areas that would’ve sometimes gone unnoticed under the radar. Using Excel to create your project tracking template is pretty simple and you can see that by looking at the example shown below.
Project cost tracking template walkthrough in Excel:
Every project is different; they all come with their different set of requirements and tools. What you firstly have to do is look at all the different areas of your project including operations, equipment, labor etc. Then track all your important areas of expense.
Step 1
Create 4 top columns these should be named items, performance period, to date and total. Under the items column, you are going to track your different expenses. These should include installation, labor, requirements, maintenance, custom access, client inquiry and checkbook order.
Step 2
In the performance period you are going to measure your cost performance over a certain period of time. You are going to insert under it three rows, these are going to be budget, actual and actual budget. You are going to apply the same structure under “to date”.
The three rows are going to be budget, actual and actual budget. In both your “actual budget” columns you are going to minus the value in your actual column from the one in your budget column. This will give you your remaining budget.
To do this in Excel all you have to do is in the “actual budget” column, you are going to firstly put an = sign following by the computation (=budget-actual). Then after the computation is inserted press enter and you are going to see the end result
Step 3
Under total you are going to calculate your end budget. You must have two rows these are going to be budget and remaining budget. You are going to calculate the difference between your overall total budget and the actual amount used to data.
As you can see by looking at the steps shown above it’s pretty simple to create a project cost tracking template in Excel. You can even look at other tutorials online. That will allow you to create a project cost tracking template in no time. It’s all up to you and what you are looking for because Excel is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it properly.
You could even use your collected data and turn them into charts and other diagrams. That can help you to get a better outlook on your information. You can see an example of everything being portrayed above below.
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