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Budgets on projects and campaigns (2026-09-08)

Every project detail page — and every campaign — has a Budgets tab. A budget is a planned amount you spend "until it zeros": you declare the plan, add the items you intend to buy (cable, switches, installation, a Meta ads run…), then mark them ordered and purchased as the money actually moves.

  • The bar shows spent vs planned. Green while you are under the line; red once spent + ordered exceeds the plan. Items purchased x / y tells you how far the plan has progressed.
  • Committed = ordered but not yet paid; Actual = purchased; Remaining = planned − actual − committed.
  • Ceiling. Each budget decides for itself what happens when someone tries to spend past the plan. Pick one when you create it (you can change it later):
    • Auto-block — the item is refused, full stop. Use it when the number is a hard limit.
    • Soft-block — the item is refused, but the person is offered a box to explain why it is needed. Write a justification and it goes through; the reason is saved on the line and on the budget's history, so you can see later who went over and why.
    • No block — the item is always accepted and the bar simply turns red. Use it when the budget is a forecast, not a limit.
  • Approvals (soft-block only). Tick Over-budget items need approval and a justified over-budget item does not count right away: it waits as Awaiting approval, greyed out of the totals, until someone opens the budget and clicks Approve (it starts counting) or Decline (it never does). The person who raised it cannot approve their own — that is the point of the hop.
  • Sub-budgets. A budget can contain budgets — a campaign budget with Mail list, WhatsApp and Trade show sub-budgets, each with its own items. Totals roll up to the parent.
  • Where the money is. Budgets and items are transactions. The Accounting → Transactions list shows the budget master (with the branching icon that means "contains line items"); items sit under it, and each item can carry the actual purchase transactions when a thing is bought in several instalments.

Actions on an item: Ordered (commits the amount), Purchased (counts as spent), Dropped. An item waiting on an over-budget approval shows Approve / Decline instead until it is decided. Budget masters have their own actions (propose, approve, activate, close).

Changing something after you saved it. The pencil next to a budget's name reopens it (name, planned amount, ceiling, description); the pencil on an item row reopens that line. An edit is checked against the ceiling exactly like a new item — if raising a line would push the budget past its plan, a soft-block budget asks you for the same written justification, and if that budget requires approval the line goes back to Awaiting approval until someone decides it. Two things are deliberately not editable: a line that is already waiting on an approval (the reviewer must decide on the number the justification was written for), and the actual purchase transactions underneath an item, which you change from the Accounting → Transactions page.

On the item form, Unit is a dropdown fed by the same units catalogue the product form uses (un, m, h, kg…), and Vendor lists every company with a small badge saying whether it is a customer, supplier or partner — suppliers are not always tagged as such, so nothing is hidden from the list.