I understand that, at present time, "Budgeted Cost" is an edit-only, non-auto populated field. We (co.) would like to see the cells in this column, auto-populated based on: the Planned Effort hour(s), the Assigned To resource(s) and their respective hourly rate(s). Coincident with this, I believe we would like the cells to (by default) be read-only for non-managers. A manager should be able to edit the cells.

Some of your customer may not need this capability. If so, this could be a settings option that can be disabled. I would have to believe that others would want/need this capability, by default.