Recurring Budgets! (also, cat sweaters)

Budgeting time is not the most exciting concept to discuss—unless it’s qualified by the statements “large sums dedicated to” and “for fulfilling dreams.”

Unfortunately, we at Freckle can’t manifest a fairy ATM machine with a penchant for life coaching as your next client or ours for that matter.

What we can do, thanks to our newest feature of Recurring Budgets, is make calculating the ever shifting equation of time and projects a lot more simple to figure. And nearly effortless to track.

Recurring budgets are easy to enjoy as a pie someone else made and delivered to your desk.

Recurring budgets are super-useful, whatever the size of your Freckle account maybe be. They work for freelancers, team supervisors, and project leads in larger organizations.

What Recurring Budgets Can Help You Achieve

Need help getting enough time in for those aspirational time goals, like building new skills? Or perhaps you want to keep tabs and have hard limits on weekly, monthly, or quarterly hours when you bill by the hour? No problem!

Aspirational

Want to become a Wizard with the knitting needles? Set aside 5 hours a week towards your new craft! Let Freckle calculate how much time you are actually spending towards your goal, and see what soft, warm magic can be crocheted in a few months.

This info will be mapped on the project page and can be found as a pie chart on the dashboard. Self-reflect about how good that Etsy cat sweater store will actually be if you only spend 30 minutes a week out of that 5 hours knitting!

This is Haskell. He’s cute.

Hard Boundaries and Shifting Time

Is a client paying for a strict amount of hours when it comes to maintenance or anything else?

Break down how many hours a week or month or quarterly you will need for maintenance over the course of the project. Set how often you want that data to start afresh, then let recurring budgets do the heavy lifting.

Additionally, with data collected supervisors and team leaders can compare crew time to see who is being weighed down and who has extra bandwidth to take on new roles. It seems Dave in Marketing has more than enough time to help Allan in Art Direction get those 4,000 cat sweaters looking adorable and loaded on to your customers new website.

How to Set Up Recurring Projects

To enable recurring budgets (or just normal budgets that don’t recur!) go to a project page and click on Settings, then click on Budget. In the Repeats downdown menu, you can choose weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly repeating budgets. You decide when the clock should restart.

Once a Recurring Budget is set, then keeping tabs on how the venture is progressing is a matter of glancing over a graph on the project page. See how much time has been spent and billed per period over the course of the project. Free bonus: You also get this graph if the project doesn’t have any budgets! And we divvy it up between billable and unbillable time for you.

Recurring Budgets are definitely not as sexy as pools of money to spend on life goals—but it is sexy in that useful practical way.

That’s what we at Freckle strive to give to you: useful, practical digital tools to help you accomplish your goals, without wasting time and money.

Still feeling unsure about how to enable Recurring Budgets to work for you? Get on the schedule for a weekly live webinar with our Sales wonder-woman Rasa Vella. Have specific questions? Send our support team an email at [email protected] and our Support Guru Amber Gohn will make everything alright.