The budget is not directly entered because it is NOT the amount you've been
allocated and are allowed or supposed to spend. Rather it is an estimate of
how much you think you really will spend - bottom-up rather than top-down.
Project calculates this for you by taking the number of man-hours the
resources are scheduled on the task times his rate and adds any material
resource costs. You supply the resource rates for regular work (standard
rate) and overtime work (ot rate) and per unit costs for materials on the
resource information sheet, as well as whether this cost accrues to the
budget pro-rated over the duration of his tasks, 100% at the start of the
task, or 100% at the end of the task. After assigning resources, if you
display the Cost table in the Gantt chart you'll see the budgeted cost for
each task and their rollups to the summary task level. This cost table,
BTW, is also where you add any fixed costs you may need to take into
account. Strictly speaking it's showing projected cost which then becomes
the budgeted cost once it's approved and you save a baseline. You can also
use the task or resource usage views, display the cost rows in the
timescaled side of the screen, and see how the budgeted costs are
distributed over time.
