Project burn rate
How fast a project is using its fixed pool of hours or money, and how long that pool will last at the current pace.
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What it is
Project burn rate is how quickly a job consumes the finite pool you sold: hours, money, or credits per week. A 400-hour budget burning 50 hours a week has eight weeks of runway if the pace holds. This is not startup burn rate, which usually means how much cash the whole company spends each month. If your team already lives in a Scrum burndown chart, the shape is familiar: remaining work sloping toward zero against an ideal line, drawn with money and hours instead of story points.
Track it from kickoff and review it at least weekly. Compare cumulative burn with the plan for that date, then forecast the exhaustion date by dividing the remaining pool by the recent weekly burn. If delivery is behind while burn is ahead, cut scope, add budget through a change order, or reset the dates before the pool reaches zero. Larger contractors run the same comparison as earned value management, where the cost performance index (value earned divided by cost actually spent) slipping under 1.0 is the formal version of burning faster than you are delivering.
Gotcha: billing pace and burn rate are different clocks. A fixed-price project may invoice by milestone while internal hours disappear every day. A suspiciously low burn can also mean missing timesheets, not sudden efficiency, so reconcile the tracker before celebrating.
Ask AI for it
Build a Google Sheets project burn-rate tracker from the budget and time log below. Add an ISOWEEKNUM helper column, use SUMIFS against it to total hours and cost per week, show planned versus actual cumulative burn, calculate remaining budget and current four-week average burn, then convert remaining budget divided by weekly burn into weeks and add it to the latest log date to forecast the exhaustion date. Add a SPARKLINE for the trend and flag any week where actual cumulative burn is more than 10% ahead of plan. Return the column layout, exact formulas for row 2, and a plain-English weekly status summary. Do not invent missing time entries.