How to track project budgets and retainer hours in monday.com

By Kayabyte

Short answer: monday.com can show hours logged against an item, and with a formula column it can turn those hours into money. Combine the Time Tracking column, a Formula column (hours x rate), a Numbers column for the budget and a dashboard, and you get a working budget view for one board. It stops at forecasting, rates that change over time, retainer hours that roll over and budgets that span boards. For those you need a spreadsheet you maintain, or an app such as Burnrate for monday.com.

Your team logs time in monday.com. A client has a fixed fee or a monthly retainer. You want to know what has been used, what is left and whether it will last until month-end. This guide shows how to set that up with monday.com alone, and where each part stops. Plan availability changes, so check your plan before you build.

What monday.com gives you

Time Tracking column: a timer or manual entry per item, with a history of each session. It is usually listed for higher plans, but sources disagree on the exact tier, so check your plan.
Formula column: calculations on other columns of the same board.
Numbers column: a plain number, such as a budget in hours or money.
Dashboards: widgets such as Numbers, Battery and Chart that read from connected boards.
Automations: rules that notify people when something changes.
Export: a board can be exported to Excel from the board menu.

Step by step: budget and cost on one board

Add the columns. On the board where your team logs time, add a Time Tracking column. Add a Numbers column called Hourly rate and another called Budget (money).
Turn tracked time into hours. The Time Tracking column is shown as hours and minutes, but a formula can receive it in a different unit, often seconds. Insert it with the formula editor’s column picker, and if the number looks thousands of times too big, divide by 3600. Check the result against an item where you know the time.
Add a Formula column called Cost. A pattern often shared in the monday community looks like this: ROUND(MULTIPLY({Time Tracking#Hours},{Hourly rate}),2). Column names go in curly braces. Use the column picker in the formula editor to insert them, so the names match exactly.
Add a Formula column called Budget left. For example {Budget} - {Cost}. Add a second one for the share used, {Cost} / {Budget}, and format it as a percentage.
Show totals on a dashboard. Create a dashboard and connect the board. Add a Numbers widget to sum Cost, a Battery widget for status progress, and a Chart widget to compare cost by item or group. Boards per dashboard are limited by plan, and a dashboard has a limit on widgets and items, so check the current limits for your account.
Add an alert. Standard automations can’t watch a formula column, so they won’t fire when Budget left goes below zero. Add a Status column with an “Over budget” label that someone sets during a weekly review, and in Automations create a rule that notifies the account manager when the status changes to it.
Share the numbers. Use the board menu to export the board to Excel when finance asks for a copy.

For a retainer, add a Dropdown or Status column for the client, and a Numbers column with the monthly hours. Then use a board filter or a group per month to see one month at a time.

Where it stops

No burn forecast. The columns show what has been used so far. They do not show the pace or the date a budget runs out. You can work this out by hand from the last few weeks, but nothing updates it for you.
Rates that change over time. A formula multiplies the hours by the rate in the rate column. If you change the rate, every past item is re-priced with the new rate. To avoid that, you need a new column or a new board for each rate period, and the totals get harder to follow.
Cost and billing are different rates. What an hour costs you and what you bill the client are two numbers. You need two rate columns and two formulas, and a rate per person means a rate lookup that a plain formula cannot do on its own.
Retainer hour banks that roll over. A formula works within one board. Carrying unused hours into the next month, for a set number of months, means copying a balance by hand each period.
Budgets across boards. A formula column reads only its own board. A budget that covers several boards, or only the items for one client, has to be added up in a dashboard widget or in Excel.
Time tracking is read-only for tools. monday.com’s developer documentation says timer values cannot be updated or cleared through the API. That is good for the integrity of your hours, but it means you cannot fix entries with a script.
Sharing. A dashboard that shows cost also shows rates. Keeping hours visible but rates private takes careful board and dashboard permissions.

Rules that keep the numbers trustworthy

Never edit a past rate. Record a new rate with a start date.
Decide once what a budget covers: one board, several boards, or one client.
Decide whether a budget is one-off or resets every month or quarter.
Mark non-billable work in a column, and exclude it in the formula.

Burnrate for monday.com

Burnrate for monday.com is the app we make for the parts above that stop. It reads the time your team already logs in the Time Tracking column, or an hours log you keep, and does not change your time tracking. It is not yet listed in the monday.com marketplace, as the review is pending. You can install it through this monday.com authorization link.

Budgets in money or hours, one-off, monthly or quarterly. A budget can span several boards, or only some groups or items, for example where Client = Acme.
One budget per client, created in one step from your Client column.
A rate card with dated cost and billing rates for a default rate, roles and people. A new rate applies from its date, so past numbers never change.
Each budget shows On track, At risk or Over budget, the burn so far and when it will run out at the current pace.
Monthly and quarterly retainers with a trend of the last periods. On Pro, unused hours or money can roll over into the next period.
A monday notification to watchers at the warning level and when a budget goes over.
Reports by board, group, item, person, month or client, with CSV download.
On Pro, each item’s cost and billable amount can be written into Numbers columns for your own dashboards, formulas and automations.

There is a Free plan with one budget. See pricing for the paid plans.

FAQ

Does monday.com have a built-in budget feature? Not as a dedicated budget with an amount and a period. You build it from columns: a Time Tracking column, a rate, a formula for cost and a budget column, then show the totals on a dashboard.

Why is my cost formula far too high? A formula can receive tracked time in seconds rather than hours. If it multiplies that value by an hourly rate, the result is thousands of times too big. Divide by 3600, or pick an hours value in the formula editor, and check the result against a known entry.

Can a formula use rates that change over time? Not on its own. A formula uses the rate currently in the rate column, so changing it re-prices all past items. Keep dated rates in a separate table, or use an app with a dated rate card.

Can I track one budget across several boards? A formula column reads one board. Dashboard widgets can add up columns from several connected boards, within your plan’s limits, but they do not give you a budget with a period, a run-out date or a rollover.

Can I export budget data to Excel? Yes. Use the board menu to export a board to Excel, or download a Burnrate report as CSV.

Does Burnrate change my time tracking? No. Burnrate never writes to time tracking columns. It only writes to Numbers columns that you choose for write-back.

monday.com is a trademark of monday.com Ltd. Kayabyte is an independent developer and is not affiliated with or endorsed by monday.com.