What's CAPEX? What's OPEX? How to track them both in Jira?

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When tracking projects, we often focus on other aspects such as statuses, due dates, stakeholder engagement, project risks, deliverable quality, planning security, and overall execution, which makes total sense. However, it's crucial to remember that finances are vital; without the money, there's no project to track.

Tracking budgets and costs for projects allows you to create awareness of the balance of expenses and savings you can get from a project, and performing this action in project management software tools can be challenging, given that those tools usually focus on what was stated at the beginning of this post.

Acquiring an additional tool besides the one you're using to track projects can potentially create silos when managing the project, confusion when changing between tools, and data can get lost or misstated.

Software products for business intelligence, such as PowerBI or Tableau, ERP systems, such as SAP, Oracle ERP, or Dynamics 365, or even custom solutions as simple as an Excel custom dashboard or a Google Sheet, will always add more friction to budget management when added to your project management tool. That's why it's better to centralize the data and the management.

The secret is to centralize your financial project data

If you use Jira for project management and you already know that you should manage all data in the same place, you need to define which financial information to track.

For this, it's relevant to define Budget tracking, which is the process of monitoring and comparing actual project costs against the predetermined budget throughout the project's duration, and Cost tracking, which refers to the process of monitoring and recording all expenses associated with a project budget throughout its lifecycle.

Among these costs, it's vital to highlight direct and indirect costs, as well as CAPEX and OPEX. These last two are essential because:

• CAPEX stands for Capital Expenditures, which are funds destined for the acquisition, development, or upgrading of physical assets essential for project success and strategic growth in the long term.

• OPEX, which stands for Operating Expenses, represents those ongoing costs necessary for a project's day-to-day functioning, ensuring a smooth project run.

As you might see, determining the criteria for monitoring this data can be challenging. That’s why Budgety is a solution that allows you to track essential financial information very straightforwardly.

Managing your project budgets will be very simple once Budgety is installed, from the Marketplace or directly from your Jira. Let me explain:

I'm going to walk you through the process that will start by setting the budget information (1) and associating it with the project of interest (2):

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2. 

Once your budget information is set, Budgety allows you to add all costs associated with the budget. These costs can be direct, indirect, or even CAPEX and OPEX. You can specify the logged work or unit cost for each cost (3), having the freedom to edit, delete, or add additional cost details as needed (4).

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The flexibility of this solution allows you to have a tailored dashboard with a comprehensive overview of the different types of costs associated with specific project budgets:

Learn more about how to do this.

And that's not everything; Budgety has an upcoming integration with Atlassian's artificial intelligence, Rovo, making life easier. e.g., making Jira deliver an executive summary about your budgets:

You can learn more details about how to input CAPEX and OPEX costs. If you are curious about this solution, you can always try it for FREE in the Atlassian Marketplace or right from your Jira 😉

Please contact us with any questions or needs about this new budget and cost-tracking tool for Jira, which will streamline your project management.