Creating Tasks and Budgets in BigTime

Tasks are individual units of work, and they’re an important feature in BigTime. They make up a project and set a project budget. This article provides detail about tasks: where and why you make them.

Note: Instead of “tasks,” your firm may refer to these units of work as “budget items,” “phases,” “work items,” or “engagements.” It’s easy to update the lexicon settings in BigTime to accommodate your firm’s needs.

Why Tasks?

For some firms, a project budget starts as a simple line item with an estimate and hourly budget. This might be all that you need: a straightforward, one-line estimate to track the overall budget for a project.

Other projects, however, require breaking down the work into components (tasks)—both to help your team work more efficiently and to help your customers understand what they’re paying for when it comes time to invoice for your work. Plus, each task can be divided further into subtasks. For example, the task “build website” may have subtasks like “design layout” and “present options to client.”

You can create tasks and subtasks in two locations in BigTime: on your Task Dashboard and on the Task Editor. You can make tasks in either location, and they’ll populate in each. However, oftentimes users find it convenient to create tasks in the Task Editor because they can easily toggle among other BigTime features that use tasks or task-related data, like Gantt charts.

Task Info, Project Budgets and Dates

Tasks provide useful information that can be used with BigTime features, like reports and Gantt charts. When you create a task, you can add important information like assignments, budgets, and accounting details.

Here are a few important points about tasks when you toggle among the three tabs show in the image above (General Info, Budgets/Dates, Accounting):

• Add general task-related information. You’ll have to provide a task name and assign the task to a project. Then, add as much or as little information about a task as you’d like, like due dates and priority type.
• Create task budgets and determine deadlines. How long will it take to finish a specific task? And how much will it cost to complete it? These are important details to think through and add to your task.
• Link a task to QuickBooks. Fill out the required fields and have BigTime transfer task-related data to QuickBooks automatically.

Subtasks

You also have the option to add subtasks to your tasks. They’re a way to breakdown a task to smaller parts. Here, too, you can budgets, assignments, and the like. You can create subtasks on both your Task Dashboard and Task Editor.

Task Editor Impact on Foresight Planning Tab

If you use Task-Based Resourcing, available in BigTime Foresight, changes in the project Task Editor will automatically synchronize with your projects in BigTime Foresight. Learn more: Task-Based Resourcing in BigTime Foresight.

The table below explains how you can manage and view project information across BigTime and Foresight: