Budgets and Cost Items

Every project needs a financial plan. In GreenVee, that plan is built from two closely related records: a Budget and one or more Cost Items.

Budget

A Budget is the financial target attached to a single Cost Item. It holds:

Field	What it means
Target Value	The planned allocation — the number you are aiming to stay within
Goal Value	An aspirational or stretch target, used for internal benchmarking
Currency	The currency for this budget (e.g. EUR, USD)

A Budget does not stand alone. Every Cost Item has exactly one Budget — they are inseparable. When you create a Cost Item, GreenVee creates the accompanying Budget automatically.

Note

Budgets in GreenVee are planning records, not accounting ledgers. Changing a budget value here does not update your ERP or finance system.

Cost Item

A Cost Item belongs to exactly one Project and is a single category of planned spending within that project’s budget. GreenVee doesn’t use a freeform name for a Cost Item — its Category doubles as its label, shown together with its Type, e.g. “Material Cost – Operating”.

Each Cost Item has the following fields:

Field	What it means
Key	A short code used in reports and integrations
Type	One of three accounting categories (see below)
Category	A specific classification within that type — this is also what GreenVee displays as the Cost Item’s name
Color	A display color for dashboards and charts
Project	The project this Cost Item belongs to
Budget	The target and goal values for this line (1:1 relationship)

Cost Item types and categories

Every Cost Item has a type, and the category you can pick depends on that type:

Type	Categories
Operating	Material Cost, Personnel Cost, Other Opex
Investing	Capital Investments
Financing	Loan Repayment, Interest Payment, Dividend Payment

Choosing the right type and category ensures that rolled-up reports group costs correctly across programs and portfolios.

Where Cost Items live

Cost Items attach to Projects only. There is no Cost Item that belongs directly to a Portfolio or a Program.

Portfolios and Programs still have their own Budget Goal — a single aspirational target value on the Portfolio or Program record itself. Their Budget views don’t total up a set of their own Cost Items; instead, GreenVee looks up every Project underneath the Portfolio or Program (directly, or through its Programs) and adds up those projects’ Cost Items and Cost Occurrences on the fly. So a Portfolio’s or Program’s “Budget” figure is always a live rollup of its projects, not a record you edit directly.

For Finance

Use Cost Items to break a project’s total budget into meaningful, reportable buckets. Align the Type and Category with your chart of accounts. Use Key to match the codes your finance team already uses in Excel or your ERP. Consistent keys make data exports much easier to reconcile.

How it all fits together

Project
  └─ Cost Item ("Material Cost")
       ├─ Budget (Target: 50,000 EUR | Goal: 45,000 EUR)
       └─ Cost Occurrences (actual/expected spend entries)

Portfolio (Budget Goal: 500,000 EUR)
  ├─ Project A ─ Cost Items ─┐
  ├─ Project B ─ Cost Items ─┼─ rolled up live into the Portfolio Budget view
  └─ Program X
       └─ Project C ─ Cost Items ─┘

Once a Cost Item and Budget are in place, the team records actual and expected spending as Cost Occurrences. See Occurrences for how that works. For how a project’s costs, earnings, and benefit come together, see Benefits and the Business Case.