Bottom-up budget planning

In contrast to top-down budget funding, "bottom-up" budget funding is useful if you are not sure how much funding to allocate down from the plan to child objects, but can forecast line items for the programs and projects. After predicting all project expenses, you can roll them up to parent programs, and ultimately, to plans.

Using the previous example, if you can predict the line item expenses of the New Customer Acquisition project in your Trade show 1 program, you can finalize those line items to roll them up into Trade show 1's expenses. Then, add additional line item expenses to Tradeshow 1 if necessary and finalize them to roll expenses for Trade show 1 up to the parent plan, New Product Launch. Starting from the bottom-most level, continue to add expenses to projects, programs, and plans until the parent plan accounts for all necessary allocations.

In summary, you manage budgeting from projects up to programs and plans in the following way.

1. Create projects and forecast their line item expenses.
2. Link the projects a parent program and plan.
3. Finalize the line items on each child object in the plan to roll up the expenses. You can now see how much funding the programs and projects need for successful completion.