Income in Budget values not rendered/accumulated in WBS views | Cashflow

Lukas

Hi,

I'm using Merlin Project to track both construction costs and project financing (bank credit tranches) in the same project, using the Approved Budget field.

Setup:
My WBS has two parallel top-level branches under the project root "LewanHOUSE - Cash Flow": one called "KOSZTY" (costs, positive Approved Budget values matching my construction budget) and one called "PRZYCHODY" (income — bank financing and client installments). Under PRZYCHODY, I have "Kredyt BS Jarocin" with an Approved Budget of -5,500,000 PLN, distributed via percentage across several milestones ("TR 1 - Poziom „0"", "TR 2 Mury poziom 1", etc., each at -10% / -550,000 PLN), linked to construction-progress milestones so they get real dates.

The problem:
In the Work Breakdown → Budgeting view (a custom view with Content = "Approved Budget Absolute" and Cumulate Content = Yes, configured via Styles → For Selection), the time-phased Gantt bars work correctly when the Approved Budget is positive: bars are drawn per period and the cumulative total updates correctly.

However, when I set the same field to a negative value (to represent incoming cash), two things happen:

No bar is drawn at all for that period in the Gantt.
The negative value also appears to be excluded from the cumulative running total shown in the time-phased chart — even though the static outline columns (Approved Budget, Approved Budget Absolute, Budget/Expected Costs Balance) correctly display the negative sum (e.g., "PRZYCHODY" correctly totals -7,300,000 PLN in the plain column).

I confirmed this with a direct A/B test: switching "Kredyt BS Jarocin" between +5,500,000 and -5,500,000 with everything else unchanged — positive renders bars and cumulates correctly, negative renders nothing and the running total doesn't reflect it.

Question:
Is this expected behavior (i.e., time-phased Gantt/Budgeting views are only designed for non-negative cost accumulation), or is there a supported way to display negative values (income/credit inflows) in a time-phased chart alongside positive costs — for example via a Style "By Rules" condition, or by using resource-based Work Costs (negative Standard Rate) instead of Base Cost/Approved Budget? I'd like to build a single combined project cash flow chart (costs minus income) directly in Merlin rather than exporting the values to a spreadsheet.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

Pete

Hi Lukas

and thanks for your detailed informations on your project case.

First of all:
Yes, you are right, as soon as you insert a negative (approved) budget, this will not be shown within the Gantt.
We can not really tell at this point, if this is based upon style or calculation or...
... so we forwarded this information to our developers, they will check the behaviour and we will wait for some feedback.

Diving a little bit deeper into your prodived informations, we would recommend giving your costs a second, different approach.

"Incoming cash"
In our understanding, this is not a negative value, as you get money that stocks up your available cash, the budget. So from the basic understanding, this will be a positive additional budget.
Using "Base Costs" in Merlin Project does also the job for that approach:

inserting a base cost, this will be drawn from the approved budget
inserting a negative base cost will add up as positive balance between budget and expected costs

Following example shows three different versions of using base costs:

Does that example help already to try out a different approach within your project?