Project budgets
A project budget isn't a single number you watch drift up or down. It's a structure — sections and line items, held across versions and scenarios — plus a small set of figures that are each true at the same time and answer different questions: what did we plan, what have we committed to, what has actually happened, and what has been billed.
The structure: sections, line items, versions, scenarios
A deal's budget is organized into sections (logical groupings like "Production", "Sponsorship", "Hospitality"), each holding line items — individual services with a quantity and a price. Every deal always has at least one version — ema creates it automatically the moment the deal needs a budget, so you can start adding sections and line items immediately.
Two structures let you compare options without losing history:
- Versions are snapshots of the whole offer at a point in the negotiation ("Initial Proposal", "Revised Proposal"). A new version inherits the previous version's sections and line items, so you revise without starting over. Older versions become view-only.
- Scenarios are alternative configurations within the same version — "Standard Package" next to "Gold Sponsor" next to "Gold Sponsor plus Workshop" — so you can show a client several options in one meeting without creating a new version for each.
Reach for a scenario when you're comparing options at the same point in the negotiation — nothing has changed hands yet, you're just presenting alternatives. Reach for a new version when the client has actually asked for a revised proposal and you want to keep the previous offer intact for history.
Scenario totals are never added together in the budget summary — each scenario is a complete alternative offer, so the summary reflects only the scenarios you've chosen to show at that moment.
Create and compare scenarios within a deal version.
The project-level budget dashboard and the version-comparison view.
Several numbers, not one
Once a budget is live, "how are we doing" has more than one honest answer, and ema deliberately keeps them as separate columns rather than collapsing them into one "actual". The deal's Financial Statement shows, per line, excluding tax:
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Expected | The budgeted amount for the line — what the plan says |
| Incurred | Costs or revenue actually incurred to date |
| Invoiced | The amount that has been invoiced |
| Paid | The amount that has been paid or received |
| Outstanding | The difference between invoiced and paid |
Sitting alongside those, a commitment is a separate concept that isn't a Financial Statement column but drives what eventually shows up as Incurred: a purchase order is a formal commitment at agreed quantities and prices, raised before a cost is incurred, so what the vendor delivers can be checked against what was ordered. The PO, the goods received note, and the vendor's bill are matched three ways, so quantity or price differences are flagged rather than silently absorbed. A cost with no PO behind it only appears for the first time when the bill arrives, at whatever figure the vendor put on it — nothing caught it earlier.
Variance always has a column name
"The margin moved" only means something once you say against what. Variance can be measured against the budget (Expected), against what's been committed, or against what's been invoiced — and each answers a different question. A line that's under budget against Expected can still be over against Committed, if a purchase order has been raised for more than was planned but nothing has been delivered yet. Name the column when you report a variance, the same way you'd name a currency.
The Financial Statement on a deal shows Expected, Incurred, Invoiced, and Paid per line, excluding tax, with an Event Balance block covering funding received and supplier costs paid. It defaults to live data; a snapshot-as-of picker rebuilds the statement as it stood on a past date, for "what did we think we'd make in May" comparisons.
The Financial Statement and Billing views for a single deal.
How a purchase order becomes a formal commitment, and three-way matching against goods received and bills.
What your client sees
If client budgets are enabled for the project, each line item has its own transparency setting — transparent (the client sees cost and markup alongside price), non-transparent (totals only), or internal-only (never shown to the client regardless of the default) — falling back to a project or deal default when a line doesn't override it. The client's own summary is four figures: total budgeted, total actual (the sum of what's been invoiced to date), variance, and outstanding balance, with a line-item breakdown and a PDF export.
On the client's budget view, "actual" means invoiced-to-date. On your own Financial Statement, Incurred and Invoiced are two separate columns. A project carrying real costs that have been incurred but not yet invoiced reads as comfortably under budget to the client while your own numbers show something different — that isn't a reporting error, it's two different, both-correct definitions of "actual." See Budget to margin for the full monthly reconciliation loop and where this gap tends to surface.
How labour cost rates, charge rates, and timesheets feed the same budget lines.
How your ema subscription and a project's billing mode are two separate commercial questions.