Portfolio Budget Burn & Forecast Dashboard: Spot the Overrun Before Leadership Does
Consolidate budget, actuals, and committed spend across every project into one governed dashboard — total portfolio burn, a forecast to year-end, and the exact projects driving any projected overrun — with a finance/PMO owner approving the consolidated number before it reaches leadership.
A logged-in dashboard where you import each project's budget, actuals, and committed spend over time, the tool consolidates total portfolio burn and forecasts spend to year-end, flags the projects driving any projected overrun, the PMO/finance owner reviews and approves the consolidated forecast, and you export the portfolio finance view as a clean CSV — without double-counting commitments against actuals.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Per-project budgets, actuals, and commitments (CSV or Google Sheet is fine)
- Your baseline budget and your fiscal year-end date
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Every portfolio review opens with the same scramble. Someone pulls each project's budget from one place, last month's actuals from the finance system, and the open purchase orders and commitments from a third spreadsheet — then stitches them into a master workbook the night before the meeting. By the time it's presented, the numbers are stale, the formulas have drifted, and nobody is quite sure whether that big committed PO is also sitting in actuals, quietly counted twice.
So the answer to the only question leadership actually asks — "are we going to blow the budget by year-end, and if so, which projects are doing it?" — comes out as a shrug and a promise to "circle back." Meanwhile the project that's quietly tracking 140% of plan keeps spending, because no consolidated forecast caught it in time.
A portfolio burn-and-forecast view is the single number a PMO lives or dies by. It deserves to be a real, governed application that consolidates the same way every month, separates committed from actual so nothing is double-counted, and shows baseline versus current — not a workbook rebuilt by hand the night before.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for your PMO and finance partners. You import, per project, the budget (baseline and current), the actuals booked so far, and the committed spend — open POs and contracts not yet invoiced — over time. The tool consolidates it all into a single portfolio view.
It computes total portfolio burn (how much you've spent and committed against budget), forecasts spend to fiscal year-end from your run-rate and remaining commitments, and flags the specific projects driving any projected overrun — ranked by how much each one pushes the portfolio over. It shows baseline vs. current so a re-baselined budget never hides the original plan. Critically, it dedupes on (project + cost line + period) and keeps committed and actual separate so a PO that's been invoiced isn't counted in both buckets. The PMO or finance owner reviews the consolidated forecast, adjusts what looks wrong, and approves it before it's ever presented to leadership or finance.
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 portfolio — how your projects and cost lines are coded, where budgets, actuals, and commitments actually live, how your periods and fiscal year are defined, how you tell a commitment apart from a booked actual, and the messy exceptions (re-baselines, transfers between projects, multi-year work, reversed POs). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the dashboard matches how your portfolio is actually structured — not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the data model, the budget/actuals/commitments import with the duplicate guard, the burn and year-end forecast engine, the overrun-driver flagging, the baseline-vs-current view, the PMO/finance approval gate, and the portfolio finance view with 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 what ERP or PPM tool you're on.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This number goes in front of leadership, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your PMO and finance team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's portfolio, a complete audit trail of who imported what and who approved which forecast, a hard human-approval gate so no consolidated forecast is presented until the PMO/finance owner signs off, and duplicate guards — deduping on (project + cost line + period) — so the same cost can't be counted twice and committed spend can't bleed into actuals.
Who it's for
PMO controllers, finance business partners, portfolio managers, and the executives who sit through portfolio reviews. If you can explain how your projects and cost lines are coded and how you tell a commitment apart from a booked actual, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have your portfolio's burn and year-end forecast on one screen before the weekend's out.