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Project Portfolio Budget Report

OnePager summarizes project portfolio budgets, helping executives compare financial status and guide investment decisions.

If you have multiple projects, you need a quick and easy way to see which projects in your portfolio are meeting their financial targets, and which ones are over budget. OnePager can create a Gantt chart for all of your projects, plus a graph of high-level budget information.

Project Portfolio Budget Report

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  1. Start with a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists all of the projects in your portfolio. This spreadsheet shows the dates, budget, and actual cost for each project:

    Excel spreadsheet showing the budget for each project in a portfolio.

  2. Launch OnePager Express. Don't have OnePager? You can download a free trial.

    OnePager Express: Easy Gantt charts from Excel.

  3. Click NEW to build a new project/portfolio report:

    OnePager Express for Excel

  4. Give your report a name, click Next, and then Create New Chart to get a first draft of your project portfolio budget report.

  5. Now, we want to add some of the budget vs. cost information from the spreadsheet into the Gantt chart. To do this, go to Home > Chart Properties > Rows/Swimlanes. In the Text Columns section, we'll add three columns: (1) the budgeted cost, (2) the actual cost, and (3) the overall project budget status:

    Show budget vs. actual cost information in your Gantt chart.

  6. With the budget vs. actual cost information now clearly showing in the Gantt chart, we now want things to stand out when they are over budget. To do this, we'll use conditional formatting. From the same Text Columns section, click on Manage Rules. We'll set up a rule that highlights cells in the second column (Actual Cost) when it's over budget:

    Projects that are over-budget will be colored red with conditional formatting.

  7. Let's add two more rules, this time for the third column, that displays a color-coded symbol to represent the overall budget status:

    Display a symbol to indicate the overall project budget status

    Here, projects that are under budget will show a green checkmark, while projects that are over budget will show a red x.

  8. Click OK to apply these settings, and you'll get a multi-project budget status report like this:
    A Gantt chart showing multiple projects in a portfolio and their planned vs. actual budget information.
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Graphing the Monthly Portfolio Budget

In addition to looking at the financials of individual projects, OnePager can also graph your total project budget over time.

  1. Go to Home > Chart Properties > Graphs/Data Cells. Create a graph that looks at the cumulative monthly budget for your project portfolio.

    Create a monthly graph of total portfolio budget over time.

    In this case, we'll display a smooth area graph, but you could display this data as a line graph or a column graph instead. You could also choose to display both the estimated budget and actual cost as two series in the same graph.

  2. Click OK and OnePager will add the portfolio budget graph to the bottom of your Gantt chart, like this:

    Gantt chart showing the budget and actual cost of multiple projects, plus a graph of the portfolio budget over time.

Once you've built your budget report, it's easy to update each week or each month and your projects and your budgets change. No need to re-build the report from scratch; OnePager can import fresh data from Excel into an existing report, making tracking and updating your portfolio of projects very easy!

Get started today by downloading a free trial, complete with our world-class tech support.

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Steps demonstrated in this article require use of OnePager's optional graphs and data cells feature, which is purchased separately from a standard license. All trial licenses receive complimentary access to graphs and data cells for fifteen days. Some sequences pertaining to unrelated features have been shortened for brevity.