Budget Changes
A flexible and controlled way to make changes to project budgets.
Background
One of the only things we know for certain in any construction project is that things are going to change. The owner changes their mind, the price of materials changes, things get installed incorrectly, or unforseen circumstances arise.
Documenting and managing change is vitally important in construction, because any change typically involves money, and at the end of the day someone has to pay for it. This is where Procore comes in.
Budget changes are a type of change that involve moving money from one budgeted line to another. Some common use cases for budget changes are balancing over- and under-budget lines at the end of the month, or moving money from contingency to cover an increase in cost.
Budget changes are composed two main elements. The adjustment is a grouping of one or more lines that indicate where money is going to and coming from. An adjustment line is the individual line within the adjustment.
One budget change can have as many adjustment and adjustment lines as needed.
Budget changes 1.0
I came onto the project full time just in time to see it through a GA release.
In the months following release, we received a ton of feedback from customers who were working adopt budget changes. While this was a highly requested feature, we noticed that many customers were encountering usability issues.
Uggh… not intuitive
It’s a lot more keying.
How do you know [this line] is going ‘from’?
-Customers, referring to the 1.0 experience
From this feedback, a few themes started to emerge.
table hierarchy issues
- Customers didn’t know where in the table to start entering data
- It was unclear where money was going to and coming from
inefficient data entry
- Many customers never use four of the columns (and having them visible by default caused data entry errors)
- It takes two clicks to add a new line
Budget changes 1.1
Although the team had not planned on actively developing new features for budget changes after the initial release, it became clear that we needed to improve it before our customers were fully satisfied.
Budget Changes 1.0 table
Budget Changes 1.1 table
Over the next few quarters I worked with product and engineering, as well as our implementation and customer support teams on a variety of improvements.
A few of the noteworthy changes:
table hierarchy issues
- The outlines on editable cells are now always visible (as opposed to only on hover)
- Added a “To/From” column to make it more clear where money is going
- Other miscellaneous improvements: added the word “Adjustment” on each groued row, made the cell input boxes responsive to the width of the column, added truncation for long text
inefficient data entry
- Added a toggle for the four columns that users rarely use (off by default)
- Each adjustment gets one “to” and “from” line by default, reducing clicks to add a new line
Usability testing
Because there were so many usability issues with the initial release, we wanted to be sure that we tested the new designs thoroughly.
Customers were asked to complete several tasks related to creating a budget change and rate the difficulty of each task. Facilitators also rated participants on task completion.
Across all tasks, the majority of participants successfully completed the task, and rated as somewhat or very easy.
Outcomes
What you’ve shown me takes away so many of my complaints.
-A customer after previewing the 1.1 changes
Once the 1.1 changes are released in May 2023, we will be monitoring our success metrics of customer satisfaction score (CSAT), overall adoption, conversion, and time to create. Based on initial qualitative feedback we are confident that these metrics will increase across the board!