Budget Adherence lets you set up alerts that compare planned budgets against what has actually been spent, plus any amounts committed through open purchase orders. Use it to catch overspending, underspending, or budget lines that are tracking over once commitments are taken into account.
Each record is one budget line for one account in one month, and carries the budgeted amount, the actual spend to date, and the committed (purchase order) amount. Account classification and tracking category fields let you review adherence across departments, cost centres, or projects. There are two variants of this data area: the accrual variant recognises spend when it is incurred, and the cash variant recognises spend only when it is paid. The fields are the same for both; choose the variant that matches how you want to measure actual spend.
The AI will only look back at 12 months' worth of data.
All amounts are in the base currency for the client.
Key Properties:
BudgetLineKey: A stable identity and grouping key for the budget line (account plus period plus tracking). There is one row per account per month, so you can sum amounts by this key to get monthly totals.
TxnDate: The budget period as a date, always set to the 1st of the month. It is a monthly bucket label rather than a real transaction date, so group or sum by it to get monthly totals.
SourceLink: A link back to the underlying budget or account record for further review.
AccountClassification: The top-level account classification (e.g. Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue or Expense), used to filter and group budget data.
AccountType: The account sub-classification within its classification (e.g. Expense, Revenue). Use it to group budget data.
AccountCode: The chart-of-accounts code for the account this budget line relates to (e.g. ACC001).
AccountName: The human-readable name of the account this budget line relates to.
TrackingCategories: The tracking categories applied to this budget line. Use them to analyse budget adherence by tracking dimension (e.g. department, project).
TrackingCategoryItem
TrackingCategoryName: The name of the tracking category (e.g. Department, Project).
TrackingCategoryOption: The selected option within the category (e.g. "Marketing" under "Department").
BudgetSubTotalAmount: The budgeted amount for the period excluding tax. BudgetSubTotalAmount + BudgetTaxAmount = BudgetTotalAmount.
BudgetTaxAmount: The tax portion of the budgeted amount for the period.
BudgetTotalAmount: The total budgeted amount for the period including tax. Compare against ActualSpendTotalAmount to calculate budget variance.
ActualSpendSubTotalAmount: The actual amount spent for the period excluding tax. In the cash variant this is the amount paid; in the accrual variant it is the amount incurred. ActualSpendSubTotalAmount + ActualSpendTaxAmount = ActualSpendTotalAmount.
ActualSpendTaxAmount: The tax portion of the actual amount spent for the period.
ActualSpendTotalAmount: The total actual amount spent for the period including tax. Compare against BudgetTotalAmount to calculate budget variance.
PurchaseOrderSubTotalAmount: The committed (purchase order) amount excluding tax that has been committed but not yet spent. PurchaseOrderSubTotalAmount + PurchaseOrderTaxAmount = PurchaseOrderTotalAmount.
PurchaseOrderTaxAmount: The tax portion of the committed (purchase order) amount that has not yet been spent.
PurchaseOrderTotalAmount: The total committed-but-not-yet-spent amount including tax from open purchase orders. Add it to ActualSpendTotalAmount to compute total commitment against budget; do not double-count it as actual spend.
📝 Example Alerts
Alert me when actual spend exceeds the budget for an expense account in any month.
Alert me when actual spend plus committed purchase orders is greater than the budget total for a month.
Alert me when an expense account has used more than 90% of its monthly budget.
Alert me when a budget line for the "Marketing" tracking option is over budget.
Alert me when committed purchase orders for an account exceed $10,000 in a month.