Studio Cost Automation Setup

I want to replace our manual cost spreadsheets with a lightweight system that automatically crunches the material costs for every project we take on while also giving me a real-time snapshot of overall studio spending. Labour and overhead aren’t in scope right now—material costs are the single data point that drives all of our key decisions, so accuracy and speed are critical.

Since its a company project, I cant share data with anyone, thus I will have to do it myself but since this is not my area of expertise, i need guidance in making this entire workflow using microsoft apps like lists, forms & automate. It shd give me

• its effect on the individual project budget
Entire workflow involving various teams.
• its impact on the studio’s running total for the month, quarter, and year

Deliverables
• A functioning cost-calculation workflow (templates, scripts, or app) that updates both project-level and studio-wide views automatically
• A clean, intuitive interface or dashboard so the team can filter by project or date range without touching formulas
• Brief documentation and a hand-off call showing how to add more projects, edit categories, and back-up the data

Acceptance is simple: if I can enter a material line item once and watch both the project balance and the overall studio spend adjust on screen, we’re good to go.