Project Budget & Burn-Rate Tracker: Catch an Overrun While You Can Still Fix It
Import each project's budget and actual spend over time, compute burn rate and a projected end-of-project cost, flag the projects heading for an overrun, and have the PM or finance owner approve before any alert or forecast change goes out.
A logged-in tool where you import project budgets and actual costs over time, the agent computes burn rate and a projected total cost, flags projects on track to overrun, shows % spent against % complete side by side, the PM or finance owner reviews and approves, and you export the burn report plus send alerts.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- An export of your project budgets (CSV or Google Sheet)
- An export of your actual cost entries over time (CSV or Google Sheet)
- Your overrun alert thresholds
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
By the time a project overrun shows up in a status report, it's usually too late to do anything cheap about it. The budget was set months ago, the actuals trickle in late, and the one number that matters — at this spend rate, what will this project actually cost when it's done? — lives in someone's head or a tab they update when they remember.
So overruns get discovered at 95% complete instead of 40%, when the only options left are bad ones. Meanwhile the spreadsheet that's supposed to catch this is a maze: one tab per project, baseline budgets mixed with revised ones, phased budgets smeared into a single line, and a "% spent" figure that nobody compares against "% complete" — which is the comparison that tells you whether you're actually on track or just early.
A burn-rate tracker fixes the timing problem. It watches spend against budget over time, projects the finish-line cost from the current run rate, and raises its hand early — while a scope conversation, a re-baseline, or a sponsor heads-up can still change the outcome.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for your PMs, sponsors, and finance partners. You import each project's budget (including phased budgets and a baseline-vs-current view) and a stream of actual cost entries over time. You set your alert thresholds — the conditions that mean "this project is heading for trouble."
The tool computes each project's burn rate (how fast it's spending), a projected end-of-project total based on that rate, and the variance against budget. It puts % of budget spent next to % of work complete, so a project that's burned 70% of its money at 40% complete lights up — that's the early warning a status deck never gives you in time. It flags every project on track to overrun, the PM or finance owner reviews the burn analysis and the projected total and approves, and only then do alerts and the updated forecast go out. Re-import the latest actuals next week and the picture refreshes — without ever double-counting a cost entry you've already loaded.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how your projects are budgeted, whether budgets are phased, what a "baseline" means to you, how and how often actuals land, what your real CSV columns are called, how you measure % complete, and exactly which conditions should trigger an overrun alert. It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the tracker matches how your projects are actually costed — not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the data model, the budget and actuals import, the burn-rate and projection engine, the % spent vs % complete comparison, the overrun flagging, the owner approval gate, the alerts, and the CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses Google Sheet / CSV imports as the data source and produces a clean CSV export — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend regardless of which PM or finance system you're on.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This tool talks about money and triggers alerts, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's projects and numbers, a complete audit trail of who imported what and who approved which forecast, a hard human-approval gate so no overrun alert or forecast change goes out until a PM or finance owner reviews the burn analysis and signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on (project + cost entry id) so the same actual can't be counted twice when you re-import.
Who it's for
Project managers, project sponsors, finance business partners, and PMO controllers — anyone accountable for a project landing inside its budget who is tired of finding out about an overrun when it's already baked in. If you can explain how your projects are budgeted and where your actual costs come from, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll see your first projected end-of-project cost on screen before the weekend's out.