I need some advice on how to keep track of the budget of a specific project.
I have planned the budget of a 9-month project which will be funded by investors. On Erpnext, i have created a new project and also defined the budget limits for related expense accounts such as salary, travel, administrative and so on.
On the other hand, i will have a budget which i can spend on fixed assets such as electronic equipments and software which will be paid by the project. How can i keep track of these expenses? Normally, i would book them against an asset account. But i can not select an asset account while budgeting the project. It only lets me to select an expense account.
Capital project budgeting is not currently available in ERPNext, maybe as a workaround you can set up an expense account for such purchases and when a PO & subsequently a purchase invoice is made, you can configure such that debit part of the expense entry goes to the configured account so that you can track these expenses separately.
Another approach would be to utilise the Cost Center Functionality. A project can be assigned to a Cost Center and you can create them as needed. In conjunction with the Budget Module you should be able to track the project, expenses and budgets.
Basically, when you use the Budget Module, you can assign accounts to that particular Budget as well as the cost center, therefore, you’d tie the Project via the Cost Center which ties in to the Budget which would have the accounts.
I see that a budget can be defined against a project or a cost center. And under both circumstances the budget limits can be defined only for expense accounts but not assets as seen in the screenshot below.
At the moment i am not able to define a budget of a project or a cost center to spend on assets as @Pawan mentioned in his message.
@Pawan I have tried selecting an expense account for a purchase of an asset but received the error seen in the second screenshot below because i have defined the purchase item as an fixed asset before buying it. In this case i can not record/track the purchases of the project as it should be. Is there any specific reason why we can not record capital expenditure (capex) for project budgeting?
You can use Project to create a CAPEX budget, POs, DRs, Stock Issuances, Timesheets and Expenses are automatically accumulated in the Project Item Record. You can also create workflow for approvals.
