Every project has a range of stakeholders, both inside and outside the company. This creates a range of costs to manage, many of which are owned by different team members.

Collaborative Budgets lets each of them submit invoices and update the project budget directly. As the project progresses and more dependencies appear, you avoid having to handle each individual cost on your own.

This makes your project budget management scalable, without any one person getting bogged down in paperwork. And crucially, you still have centralized control and can avoid any urgent issues.

The project planning phase is largely the same: you set out the project scope, contributors, milestones potential line items (expenses), and the total baseline cost in advance.

But Collaborative Budgets makes setting out each project budget quick and painless - you just follow the simple steps in the software, and don’t need any complex spreadsheets.

The biggest benefit comes through dynamic budget tracking and updating plans as the project unfolds. It’s the simplest possible method to track a budget in real time, which then lets you adjust and update at any point.

You can be even more confident in your project plans, knowing you have full visibility over spending the entire way.

Collaborative Budgets let you create and monitor as many project budgets as you need. As each new event, campaign, or other activity arises, you can quickly build a budget in just a few seconds.

You can also invite as many users as you need to collaborate with. Because these users will be different for each project, you give each team member access only to the budgets that concern them, while you keep control over them all.

This lets you trust and empower team mates to contribute and help you move quickly, but only within the right project scope.

“Projects” can mean a wide range of different things. Thankfully, Collaborative Budgets gives you a blank canvas to manage the budget you need for any kind of project. This could include:

• Marketing campaigns: from small one-off activities, to long-term, high-impact campaigns.

• Event budgets: both hosted events and trade shows or conferences.

• Business travel: client meetings, team building events, and frequent trips between offices.

• Creative projects: video or music production, podcasts, photoshoots, and workshops.

• Software and systems upgrades: everything from the original project scoping, to RFPs from providers, to the final software costs and ongoing subscriptions.

• Consultant and freelancer fees: often associated with strategic projects and updating company processes.

Crucially, you can create individual budgets for each project, and manage your overall department or company spend in the same tool, with no extra data entry.

Collaborative Budgets is completely free to use, whether you’re a paying Spendesk user or not. No credit card is required, and you can get started immediately.