Every project carries a budget and a spent figure. On their own neither says much. Together, and read against progress, they are the earliest warning you get.
The comparison that matters
| Progress | Spent | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 45% | 38% | Healthy. Ahead of cost. |
| 45% | 45% | On track. |
| 45% | 65% | Watch it. The second half is usually harder. |
| 45% | 80% | In trouble. Have the conversation now. |
| 90% | 40% | Either it went very well or the time is not being logged. |
The last row is the one to be suspicious of. A project that appears wildly profitable is usually a project where nobody logged their hours.
Why the 45/80 row is the point of all this
At 45% done and 80% spent you still have choices: reduce scope, raise a variation, put your best person on it, or accept the loss with your eyes open.
The same project discovered at the end has no choices left. Knowing in September is worth something; knowing in December is an accounting entry.
Set a budget on every project, even a rough one. Without it spent is a number with nothing to compare it to, and the tile cannot tell you anything at all.
What spend includes
- Time logged against the project, at its rate.
- What you have committed to vendors for it.
- Costs recorded against the job.
It is the cost of delivering, not what you have invoiced. Those are different questions and it is worth being clear which one you are looking at.
A habit that takes five minutes
- Once a week, open the projects list.
- Compare the progress and spent columns down the page.
- Any row where spend is well ahead of progress gets opened.
- Any project whose milestone is in the past gets opened.
That is the whole discipline. Most projects that go badly wrong were visible on this screen a month earlier.
Reading the list, not just the record
The project list shows progress and spent as columns, with the totals above. That is the five-minute weekly review: scan down, and open anything where spend is running ahead of progress.
The summary line obeys your filters, so filtering to one customer gives their total budget and total spend without building a report — which answers “is this client actually profitable” in about four clicks.
When a project is going wrong
- Check the time is real. A sudden jump is often a fortnight logged at once.
- Look at which tasks absorbed it. Usually one or two.
- Ask whether the scope grew. It generally has.
- Decide: reduce scope, raise a variation, or accept it — deliberately.
Step three is the one that pays. Scope creep is invisible day to day and obvious in the spend figure, and a variation raised in the week it happens is a conversation. The same variation raised at the end is an argument.
Where to go next
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us. A question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.