This tool may seem to have an unlikely purpose at first: It calculates a budget amount for each object that is based on the prices (or costs, for purchasing management projects) set for that object's specifications in the Specification list. Although this would not seem to be all that useful after a project has been priced, it can be very useful if that project's specs are later used as the basis of a new project, either by cloning the project or by importing some of its rooms. In that case, there are three possible uses for it: 

1. It allows you to quickly set budgets for individual objects to compare to the new project's budgets for rooms, areas and the project as a whole. 
2. It allows you to enter an inflation or market adjustment as a percent, which will then set budgets based on the original pricing plus or minus that percent.
3. If you use the "Budget Estimate by Area, Room" report formats to quote a job before actually pricing all the items in it, this can generate those budget numbers for you as a first step for those copied or imported objects with fully-priced specifications.

The Budget tool has a number of options that control how it works. Without setting any options, it will calculate budgets for all objects that do not have one (skipping those that were already set), rounding the calculated value up slightly to an appropriate value for the size of the number (thus, $1.65 becomes $1.75, while $3,567 becomes $3,600). To this basic function, you can:

• ...exclude small amounts from being rounded. This is important for low-cost items that are associated with very large quantities (such as finishes), since even slight rounding upward may produce an unreasonable "extended" total. The default is to exclude everything under $1.00, but you can change this if a different limit is needed or the currency type requires a larger number.
• ...override all existing budget amounts with a new one. Since the utility recaculates "from scratch" each time, you can experiment with different settings. This is a two-part option: If you have set manual budgets for objects where the specifications do not have prices yet, the system will protect these until you de-select the sub-option that controls this.
• ....increase or decrease the calculated budget with an inflation or market-based percentage. For instance, if you are re-using a project that was priced two years ago, you may want to add a small percentage to account for inflation. In the same way, if you are budgeting something originally designed for a major urban area, you may want to decrease it by a negative percentage. Keep in mind that this result is still rounded up.
• ...use the budget amounts to do a preliminary quote to a client. The FF&E Worksheet's "Budget Estimate by Area, Room" report uses the object budget amounts as the "price" for the quote. If you want to do this, this tool includes a "psychological pricing" option that will convert the resulting budget numbers to the familiar "priced under" format: $2.00 becomes $1.95, $350.00 becomes $349.50, etc.
• ...only run the process on a specific type of object, based on the Tag prefix. So, if you wanted to use specific budgeting options on the equipment and all your equipment had "EQP" as the prefix for the tag, you simply select that prefix from the list on the Budgeting setup. You can run the processs as many times as needed to build up budget numbers in different ways.