Your Feedback Needed: Budgeting and Hourly rates 💵

Hello Wrike Community 👋

We're eager to hear your thoughts on Wrike's budgeting features such as hourly rates and automatic financial calculations, and how they fit into your workflow. Whether you've used them or are new to this tool, your feedback is invaluable!

Please answer the questions below in the comments section. That would greatly help with our research 🙂

If you haven’t used budgeting, what is holding you back and what would make it easier for you to start using budgeting in Wrike? Let us know if something’s missing or if you were unaware of this feature, and share your ideas on what would encourage you to give it a try.
If you already gave it a try, what do you appreciate about the budgeting features? Conversely, what areas do you think could use improvement?
Generally, how does budget tracking fit into your projects or daily work? Tell us if this process is relevant to you in your work and why.

Thank you for contributing! We can't wait to hear from you 🙌

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Comments

Nathan Jones

I was having a hard time using the built-in financial fields, because if I recall correctly, they do not work across all the views, or I had to use custom fields as a workaround. That said, I added a custom field for hourly rate and for cost and use a simple effort * hourly rate to give us a rough cost for each task. That works great for our needs.

Tuomo Suominen

I submitted the support request below in November 2023 (request id#1412764). Support answered that calculations based on the cost rate in user settings are not available on task level, only on project level, and suggested a workaround, which we implemented. We’ve been struggling ever since with [hourly rate x time spent] calculations, entering the hourly cost manually in custom fields. As with all manual maintenance, there are always empty fields or wrong values, leading to double checking the figures and troubleshooting up and down the financial reporting chain, both within and outside Wrike. Having calculations based on built-in financial fields on task level would be highly appreciated!
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How to add a "calculate planned cost from subitems" field to Custom Item Type?
Tuomo Suominen
November 23, 2023 12:08
Hi there, we have project blueprints with subprojects based on linked task-type Custom Item Types, which in turn contain tasks with effort and planned cost. We're able to turn on subitems calculations for Planned cost, but that works only on project level. Is there some way we could also add a "calculate planned cost from subitems" field to our subproject Custom Item Types? Project managers need to be able to follow time spent vs planned cost also on subproject level. Using project-type Custom Item Types might solve this problem, but we see so much value in being able to reschedule the entire project by keeping the subprojects linked that we need to keep these as task-type Custom Item Types. Added a screenshot of one such project blueprint with subprojects.
Screenshot 2023-11-23 at 10.50.17.png
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Tuomo Suominen
November 23, 2023 12:18
Oh and obviously "Project managers need to be able to follow time spent vs planned cost also on subproject level" also leads to the same question regarding Time spent. We're able to turn on subitems calculations for Time spent, but that works only on project level. Is there some way we could also add a "calculate Time spent from subitems" field to our subproject Custom Item Types?
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Maria A.
November 24, 2023 05:34
Hello Tuomo,
Maria with Wrike Support here. Thank you for reaching out.
Currently, automatic calculations for effort or financial fields are not available at the task level, only at the project level. Incorporating such a feature at the parent task level might potentially lead to difficulties with resource planning and budgeting. Consequently, there are no immediate plans to introduce this functionality.
However, we do have a workaround which might assist you. You can duplicate the system field values, such as 'Time Spent' or 'Planned Cost', via a formula-type custom field. This allows you to enable sum calculations at both project and task levels. Here's how to do this:
Create a custom field to duplicate the values from the system field (for example: 'Time Spent' or 'Planned Cost').
Select the formula-type custom field and insert the desired field into the formula field settings.
Once the field is created, it will reflect the values from the system field, and you will be able to enable sum calculations on this formula field at the task level.
I hope this helps for your purposes. Should you have any other questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to let us know!
Best regards,
Maria A.
Customer Support Team

Tuomo Suominen

What are these potential difficulties with resource planning and budgeting?

Currently, automatic calculations for effort or financial fields are not available at the task level, only at the project level. Incorporating such a feature at the parent task level might potentially lead to difficulties with resource planning and budgeting. Consequently, there are no immediate plans to introduce this functionality.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Really appreciate your feedback, folks! 🙌

Russell Sprague

One feature I would love to have is being able to enter a cost and have Wrike calculate the hours based on the hourly rate. We work with a lot of contractors for parts of projects that will give us a total cost amount for their part that we add to our overall budget. I have Job Roles set up for the vendor, and can figure out the hours based on the rate I have for them, but it would be nice to skip that step.

One other thing is it would be nice to have the option to have the hourly rate pull from something other than Job Role. Or if users can have multiple job roles and can pick the role for the task. Even better would be the option to set a rate per task if needed. We often have one person doing multiple tasks that have different rates, so I have to use the job role as assignee rather than the user. This is a pain because once I switch the Job Role for the actual user doing the task, I lose my original budgeting costs.

Alina Kucherenko

Hey @Tuomo Suominen! Thank you for the feedback! Could you please expand on no ability to have task-level calculations?
Wrike's Budgeting actually does provide ability to track financials at the task level, too. In fact, task-level calculations is what is being used to aggregate values to the project level. Please see my screenshot below and let me know what might be missing for you:

Matthew McLaughlin

Budgeting is important and we use a form of it. i would love to be able to have it as a fillable field in a request form as well.

Currently I have multiple employees that are paid at different rates. I can't set the job rate by role. It would be lovely if I could update the list as if it was a spreadsheet which would allow me to to more quickly update the specific people.

We use the financial fields at the task, project, and various folder levels, and I appreciate the planned cost. I also created a profit/loss custom field that determines the budget and the costs. It would also be beneficial to have another standard field for non personnel costs so that would be easier to track in a financial project.

Matt

Tuomo Suominen

Hi @Alina Kucherenko, thanks for your reply! Your screenshot shows costs rolled-up from subtasks. In my case, it looks like this:

I can't set the Actual cost to calculate on task level, only project level:

The Wrike Help Center article Financial Fields for Budgeting https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005128341-Financial-Fields-for-Budgeting provides workaround, Financial fields rollups can be aggregated for Projects only. How do I roll up values from subitems to task level? which says:

To roll up values from subitems to parent tasks, you can re-create budgeting field using a custom Formula field. After that, put it next to the source field to overview real task values vs summed subitem values for comparison.

Based on this advice, I created a formula custom field (Logged cost (tasks) CF). This field's Calculate subitems menu does indeed present the options to Turn on calculations for Tasks and projects or Tasks only, but since the formula does not replicate the values from Actual costs (see my first screenshot), there's nothing to calculate. So no luck with this, either.

Alina Kucherenko

@Matthew McLaughlin Hey! Thank you for your feedback! I was curious to lean more on the job roles part of your message. In Wrike, you can setup hourly rates on job roles and inherit the values to people's hourly rates. Could you please let me know what is missing for you currently?

Alina Kucherenko

@Tuomo Suominen Thank you for clarification! Yes, this now makes sense to me.

Matthew McLaughlin

Alina Kucherenko What I am asking for is that the information is in the user's screen as a table where I can more easily update them rather than all of the clicks to make the changes. We do not pay by the job role, but by the person and we have 30 some teachers with the expectations that this may move up to 300 people and updating yearly may be a pain.

Alina Kucherenko

@Matthew McLaughlin Thanks for the clarification! The need to mass update hourly rates makes sense to me. In the meantime, although you mentioned that your team does not utilize job roles (and this is not the ideal solution you are looking for) I would suggest to explore this as a workaround as job role rates update automatically propagates to all people in this role.

Rochet Eng

Hi Alina!

Current budgeting capabilities are very detailed (task based), they may not be ideal for high-level estimation, especially in the early stages of projects. It will be nice to have a flexible approach that allows for top-down budgeting and forecasting as well as mechanism to capture costs split between a personnel and non-personnel costs. We typically track project expenses based on personnel, non-personnel and contingency

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback @Rochet Eng, I've sent your comment to Alina now 👍

Whitney Norton

Ditto @Rochet Eng's comment.

And also - we don't bill our people's time; we are an enterprise PMO team and while we do need to track hours for capitalization, we don't "bill" internally. Our budgeting needs are mostly with external vendors, software licensing, consultant time, hardware, fixtures, etc.

Rochet Eng

@Whitney Norton - looks like we may have the same project financial process and would love to hear more about lessons learned about how does your company use project financials within wrike?

Austin Hines

I'm a little late to the party, but our firm uses budgeting and time tracking to track time and calculate fees for our retainer clients. We're having an issue with generating an intuitive report per client in a given time period.

In our Accounts space, we have a folder for every client, and then there are subfolders for individual projects.

If we want to run an administrative report that sums up all billed time across all clients for last month, when we group by Project or Folder, we don't get an easy summary of all time for a client like we would expect, because this grouping does not retain the logic of the task and folder hierarchy.

Time associated with tasks in a client's subproject are are listed and summed as separate line items from time associated with tasks that are located in the client's root folder.

For example, all this time should be summed under ASC to match the folder structure above

This is really annoying to our leadership and admin assistants because it means that they have to export to excel and do a lot of manual massaging when they just want a simple summary report.

I would love an option in time reporting to have the project and folder grouping match the folder hierarchy.

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