Quantify the cost of scope creep by tracking change requests, additional hours, and budget overrun with visual impact dashboard.
Scope creep is work added after a project is agreed, and it rarely bills at the rate the original estimate assumed. This calculator turns every change request into money: log each request with its additional hours and an hourly rate, and it accumulates the added cost against your original budget, reporting the overrun as a dollar figure and a percentage. A dashboard compares the original and projected final budgets side by side. The most common mistake is entering only direct labor: the total is exactly what you type in, so hours spent on rework, retesting, and client review stay invisible unless you log them too.
A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.
Input
Original budget: $10,000. Three change requests, each adding 10 hours of work at a $100/hour blended rate.
Expected output
Added cost: $3,000 across 3 requests. Overrun: 30% of the original budget. Projected final cost: $13,000.
Each request prices at 10 x $100 = $1,000; the three requests sum to $3,000, which is 30% of the $10,000 baseline; adding the creep cost to the baseline gives $13,000. Every figure follows directly from the inputs.
Every logged change request is converted to money the same way: its hours multiplied by the hourly rate you entered. The calculator sums those products into a total added cost, then divides by the original budget to express the overrun as a percentage. Because requests are logged individually, the running total shows creep accumulating one request at a time, and the largest single request stands out.
The dashboard plots the original budget against the projected final budget, with the gap shaded as creep cost, and lists each change request as a bar or row so contributors compare directly. It shows what the entries imply, not a forecast: it assumes every logged hour is billed and nothing else changes, so the projected total is only as good as the hours and rates you entered.
Only if you log them as hours. The calculator multiplies the hours on each request by its rate and sums the results, so a change that triggers a week of rework stays invisible unless you add that week to the request. The reliable way to use it is to log every hour the change consumes, not just the directly billable ones.
The overrun percentage divides the added cost by the original budget, so it only measures creep against the baseline. If the baseline was understated, or the overrun mostly came from bad estimating rather than change requests, the creep share will look modest. Check the dollar figure and whether your baseline was realistic before reading the percentage.
The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.
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