Budgets

A budget is an envelope of money over a period: what you expect to spend, what has actually gone, and what that means for the end of the year.

It is off until somebody switches it on. An owner or admin turns it on under Settings → Workspace; until then there is no Budgets in the sidebar and no Budget tab on a project. Switching it off again hides the screens and keeps every figure where it was.

The four things

Budget	The envelope. A name, a currency, a period, optionally an approved total.
Cost	One thing you plan to spend money on. The plan is the sum of these.
Spend	Money that has moved, or is committed and will.
Scenario	A what-if. It never changes the plan.

Plan a cost once, not twelve times

A cost carries an amount per occurrence and how often it repeats — one-off, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Twelve months of hosting is one line, not twelve rows you have to keep aligned when the price changes.

A quarter is counted from the cost’s own start rather than from the calendar. A contract that renews in February renews in February, not in January because that is when the calendar quarter does.

Each cost also carries:

• a category — infrastructure, investment, people, licences, services, travel, training, contingency, other. A fixed list, because the whole point of a category is that two people writing down the same cost pick the same word, and a free-text box guarantees they will not: “AWS”, “aws” and “Cloud” become three rows in every chart.
• a kind — a running cost, or money spent to build. Its own choice rather than guessed from the category, because a server is infrastructure whether you rent it monthly or buy it, and only you know which you did.
• a confidence — committed, likely or possible. Nothing is weighted automatically; how much of a maybe to carry is a judgement, and scenarios are where you make it.

The period, when you do not give one

A recurring cost is planned once and repeated across the budget’s period, so the period decides how much of it is planned. A budget you have not given both dates still has one:

Dates you gave	Period
Start and end	Exactly those
Start only	Twelve months from the start
End only	The twelve months up to it
Neither	Twelve months from this one

If your costs run longer than a year, give the budget an end date. Leaving the end empty is not open-ended — it is a year, and the actuals screen says so plainly when you page to a month past it rather than claiming nothing is planned.

Who pays for it

This is the part that makes budgets worth having rather than a spreadsheet with a project column.

A Kubernetes cluster is not for one project. It is 60% the platform rebuild and 40% everything else — and both of those figures have to show up in both projects without the money being counted twice.

So every cost can be split across projects, in percent. The split adds up to 100%; if it does not, the screen says so and it is scaled when you save, because a cost that is 90% allocated is 10% that has quietly left every per-project report while still counting in the total.

The parts always add up to exactly the whole, down to the cent. Three projects splitting €10.00 comes to €10.00, not €9.99.

Not splitting is allowed. A cost with no split is unallocated, and it appears as its own row in every breakdown rather than being charged to somebody. Inventing an owner for the office coffee machine on the day you enter it is how a split stops meaning anything.

A recorded spend with no split of its own follows the cost it is filed against. That is almost always what you want — an invoice for the cluster splits the way the cluster does — and it keeps being right when you change the percentages later.

Note

Who pays for a budget and who can see it are different questions. A budget is visible to the workspace, or to one project, or to a chosen few — the same way a cycle is. A central infrastructure budget is visible to everybody and charges 40% of itself to one team. Making them one setting would mean either hiding a shared budget from the people paying for it, or showing every project’s figures to everybody.

Recording what has gone

Every spend carries a stage:

Committed	Ordered. Nobody has invoiced it yet
Invoiced	Billed, not yet paid
Paid	Gone

Committed is the one that catches people out. A purchase order raised against this quarter is money you no longer have, and a report that counts only paid invoices says a budget is healthy right up until the invoices land. So the headline “actual” here counts all three, and “spent” — the narrower invoiced-plus-paid — is on the screen beside it.

You can record a spend against a planned cost, or against nothing at all. Spend nobody planned for is the most interesting row on the screen, so it gets its own figure rather than being filed under whichever line was closest.

Closing a month in two presses

Twelve identical hosting bills a year is why the actuals in a budget stop being filled in around April, and a budget nobody records against has a plan and nothing to compare it to. So the actuals screen opens with this month’s plan and a button beside each line — confirm one, or confirm all of them at the figure the plan says.

What lands is an ordinary spend: same table, editable, deletable, nothing marking it as machine-written. It takes the line’s own day of the month (clamped, so a line that falls on the 31st lands on 28 February) and the amount of one occurrence, not the whole period.

A line that already has anything recorded against it that month is not offered again. The test is “is there anything at all”, not “does it add up” — a part invoice is a real thing, and a line matched on totals would offer the rest as a fresh full-price row and book the cost one and a half times. Under-recording shows up in the figures; a quiet double-book does not.

The forecast

One rule, and it is worth knowing because every figure on the dashboard follows it:

A month that has finished counts what actually happened. This month and every month after it count whichever is larger — what has happened, or what was planned.

That is the only version that neither charges this month twice when its invoice has already arrived, nor loses it when it has not. It also means an overrun shows up in the month it happens, rather than at the end of the year.

One consequence, stated plainly: a finished month in which nothing was recorded lowers the forecast. That is on purpose — an underspend no report can show is worse than one you have to explain — and it is what committed is for. Record the order when you place it and the forecast knows about it before the bill does.

Beside the forecast is a run rate: what the period ends at if spending simply carries on as it has. A second opinion, and worth reading when the two disagree.

Scenarios

A scenario is a list of changes applied on the way to a total. It never edits the plan, which is the whole point: “what if the migration slips a quarter and we drop the training” is something to put on a screen on Tuesday and throw away on Wednesday, and the plan the team is working to should survive both.

A change can apply to one cost, a whole category, or everything — which is what makes “cut all travel by a third” one change rather than eleven. It can scale a figure, add to it, slip it by a number of months, or drop it entirely. Changes apply in the order you write them: scaling and then adding is not the same as adding and then scaling.

A scenario can also say how much of each confidence level to carry — all of the committed money, half the likely, none of the maybes. That is the honest version of what every finance spreadsheet does by hand, with the assumption written down instead of living in somebody’s head.

Pressing Show this scenario redraws the dashboard under it, with a bar across the top so nobody quotes a hypothetical figure by accident.

Money, and the one thing it will not do

Amounts are typed however you write them — 4500, 4.500,00, 4,500.00, €4 500 are all the same amount — and shown in your own language.

One currency per budget, and nothing here converts. An exchange rate is a fact about a day, and a report that quietly picks today’s to add up last year’s is worse than one that declines to add them. A portfolio spanning two currencies shows two totals, side by side.

Where the figures are

Where	What
Budgets in the sidebar	Every budget, totalled per currency, and what each project is charged across all of them
A budget	Dashboard, the plan, what has gone, scenarios, settings
A project → Budget	That project’s share of every budget that charges it
An assistant	list_budgets, budget_status, create_budget, add_budget_line, record_spend, confirm_planned, project_costs — see the assistant

Everything is worked out from rows as the screen draws, so the whole thing — charts included — works offline, and an assistant answering a question cannot quote a different number from the one in front of you.

What it is not

Not built on time tracking. Estimates are in points and a logged hour has no rate, so a cost derived from either would be invented. A planned cost carries its own money. See time tracking.

Not billing. No invoices to send, no hourly rates, no VAT.

Not accounting. No ledger, no double entry, no period close. This is a view of money for people running projects, not a finance system.

Not an approval workflow. A budget’s status records that something was signed off; who may sign it off, and a queue of things waiting, is a workflow Kolibri does not have.

Not private. Anybody who can see a project the budget covers can see the budget, its plan and its invoices — the same rule the tasks and the logged time already follow.