Budgeting Hours by Role
Proposals and projects handle budgeting identically. Before you get to the Budget tab, your Phases and Billing Rates (roles) need to already be set up.
On the Budget tab, each phase lists the roles you've configured under Billing Rates. For each phase, enter the number of hours you expect each role to spend. As you enter hours, BaseBuilders multiplies each role's hours by that role's billing rate to calculate a Billing Value for the phase.
At this stage, if you haven't entered a fee for the phase yet, the Phase Hours Budget column will show a negative number. This is expected — it's simply the difference between the hours you've assigned to roles and the phase's overall hours budget, which hasn't been set yet.
Reviewing the Billing Value
The Billing Value shown for each phase is a straight calculation: hours entered for each role, multiplied by that role's billing rate, summed across all roles. This gives you a bottom-up estimate of what the phase — and the project as a whole — is worth based purely on the hours you think it will take.
This is useful for sanity-checking your fee before you commit to one. If your billing value comes out to $23,965 and you're planning to propose a fee of $24,000, you know your hour estimates are in the right range.
Setting Your Net Fee
Once you're comfortable with your bottom-up estimate, move to the Phases tab to enter your fee.
If you leave the fee blank when initially setting up phases, you can enter it here. Enter your target fee in the Distribute Gross Fee field, confirm your phase percentages total 100%, and select Distribute Net Fee. BaseBuilders distributes the fee across phases based on those percentages and populates the Net Fee column.
Phase percentages are typically set as part of your standard phase breakdown, but if they're missing or need adjusting, you can enter them manually before distributing.
Reviewing the Delta
Return to the Budget tab after setting your fee. You'll now see a Delta column comparing the Billing Value (based on your budgeted hours and role rates) against the Net Fee (based on your distributed fee).
A negative Delta means the phase's billing value is lower than the fee allocated to it — you're likely to be more profitable on that phase than your standard billing rates alone would suggest.
A positive Delta means the billing value is higher than the fee allocated — the phase may run tighter on profit relative to your billing rates.
A positive Delta doesn't mean you're losing money on the phase. Your billing rates already include direct labor, overhead, and profit, so a phase with a positive Delta may simply return less profit than your target, or come close to breakeven — while other phases in the same project make up the difference. Looking at the project total Delta gives you the clearest picture of overall profitability.
If you'd like BaseBuilders to redistribute budgeted hours to match your new fee amounts, you can do that from the Budget tab — but if the resulting difference is small, it's often not worth adjusting.
Adding Consultants
If your project includes subconsultants, add them from the Consultants tab. Bring in the phases the consultant will work on, then distribute their fee across those phases the same way you distributed your own fee.
Before adding a consultant fee, decide whether to lock your Net Fee or your Gross Fee on the Phases tab:
Lock Net Fee if you already know the amount you need for your own firm's work and are now adding consultant costs on top. Your net fee stays fixed, and your gross fee increases as consultant fees are added.
Locking Gross Fee instead would subtract the consultant fee from your existing gross amount, which can throw off your already-budgeted hours and leave you appearing over budget.
Once the consultant fee is distributed, the Phases tab shows your Net Fee (your firm's fee), Consultant Fees, and Gross Fee (the combined total).
Hours, Percentage, or Billing Value
The Budget tab lets you toggle between three views for entering and distributing budgeted time: Hours, Percentage of Hours, and Billing Value.
If you have hours entered, you can push them over to percentages, or push percentages over to fill in hours.
If you edit a Billing Value directly, BaseBuilders recalculates the corresponding hours automatically.
This means you can build your budget from whichever direction makes sense for the project — hours first, percentages first, or dollars first.
Best Practice
Use the bottom-up method when you want your fee grounded in a realistic estimate of hours and effort. Enter role hours first, check the resulting billing value against your target fee, then set your net fee and use the Delta to see where each phase stands relative to your billing rates.
This approach works the same whether the project is billed hourly or fixed fee — budgeting from the bottom up is about how you build the numbers, not how the client is ultimately billed.
Summary
Start by entering budgeted hours by role on each phase. BaseBuilders calculates a Billing Value from those hours and your billing rates. Set your Net Fee on the Phases tab, then return to Budget to review the Delta between billing value and fee. Add any consultants and lock your Net or Gross Fee as appropriate to keep your own budgeted hours intact.