In many companies, projects involve Hourly Not to Exceed (HNTE) contracts with many phases and sub-phases. You can track your projects against a target amount (say Target Budget) and a not-to-exceed amount (say NTE Budget) including a built-in variance beyond the target. You estimate a target number of hours and amount on each phase of a project. You can do this to manage progress and budgets to the individual phase within a given contract.
You can also create fee schedules for special rates. Depending on the majority of your contracts, you can charge different hourly rates for different activities or employees. Else, you can charge a single hourly rate for the entire contract regardless of the activity performed or employee working on the project. In this case, you only need to track your project against the target and not-to-exceed figures. Check CORE Help Center for details.
BQE CORE is designed to handle your NTE Budget in the project’s Contract Amount field. It is configurable at the project and phase level. Regarding the Target Budget, you have various options:
- Use a budget to define your target amount for each phase on a line-item level. You can measure it against a series of employees, vendors, activities or their groups with different rates. You can also generate numerous budget reports in CORE. However, make sure that no two groups have the same items for budget reporting purposes. Check CORE Help Center for details.
- Use the project’s Custom Fields to define your target budget for each phase. You can set the name and data type (Currency) for this custom field. If you want, the target hours or amount can appear in a report as well. Check CORE Help Center for details.
Some of the calculations involved are:
Remaining Target Budget to date = Target Budget Amount - Actual Amount Billed
Remaining NTE Budget to date = NTE Budget Amount - Actual Amount Billed