The budgets feature is aimed at giving finance teams and budget owners real time budget impact and visibility in Spendesk, enabling informed decisions for spend and preventing going over budget accidentally.
This new budget feature, enables flexible control, suitable for yearly financial budgets, or smaller project-based budgets.
Terminology
Here are some specific terms used by our budget feature:
Committed spend - any spend that is generated from a 'request' that hasn't yet left the wallet, for example an approved expense claim that hasn't been reimbursed
Used spend - any spend that has already left the wallet, such as a reimbursed expense claim or card payment
Configuration
To configure a budget, navigate to the Budgets page and press Create new budget.
There are 3 steps to creating a budget:
Step 1 - Setting up the criteria
This step involves setting the basic criteria for this budget:
Name - a unique description for this budget
Period - the start and end date this budget corresponds to, for example a given financial year
Granularity - whether or not the budget forecast is set a single amount for the period, or broken down by a specific amount per month
Budget Owners (optional) - Assign "Budget Owners" other than Controllers and Admins to manage and control budgets with full edit permissions and real-time tracking. If no members are assigned, only Controllers and Admins can edit the budget, track expenses, and receive notifications.
Step 2 - Defining the structure
In this step, you define the structure of your budget, this can be done via:
Manual creation of the structure using the new UI
AI budget file upload - upload your budget spreadsheet and have us pre-fill all the budget configuration. Your data stays private: We only use your file to set up your Spendesk budget. Your budget data isn’t used to train AI models and isn’t shared with other customers. AI can make mistakes, so please double‑check key details before confirming.
The budget structure can be defined flexibly across a variety of dimensions, values and multiple sub-budget layers.
The available budget dimensions are as follows:
Cost centre
Expense category
Supplier
Custom analytical field
When creating your structure, you may see special options such as « All other and future » and « Unassigned ». These help make sure spend is still captured in your budget, even when values are missing or created later.
All other and future
The All other and future option groups together:
values that already exist but are not explicitly assigned to another sub-budget
values that may be created later, after the budget is set up
For example, if you create a budget by cost center and a new cost center is added later, that new cost center will automatically be grouped under All other and future cost centers unless you assign it to a more specific sub-budget.
This is useful because it lets you plan for future values and ensures that related spend is still captured in the budget, instead of being left out.
Unassigned
The Unassigned option captures spend linked to transactions where a value for that dimension was not selected.
For example, if you create a budget by expense category and expense categories are optional for employees when they submit spend, some transactions may have no expense category assigned. Without an Unassigned sub-budget, that spend may not be reflected clearly in your budget breakdown. By creating an Unassigned sub-budget, all spend for the same budget period with no assigned value for that dimension will still be included in your budget.
Step 3 - Setting the forecast values
Finally, you set the actual forecast values for each dimension.
If you selected 'overall' in the criteria step for granularity, you just need to set a single value per dimension.
If you selected 'monthly' you'll specify a value for each month within the budget period. You can use the 'distribute evenly' button to make this easier if you have many similar values.
Once you've saved the budget, you'll be returned to the budget overview screen and if it's an active budget period, impact on the budget will immediately be shown.
Usage
Viewing your budget
Budget impact can be seen in the following places:
Budget overview screen - this is the home of budgets and allows you:
see the overall health of all your budgets
drill into the budget to see spending breakdowns for both committed and used spend
Request impact (coming soon) - Approvers who are budget owners or viewers will be able to see the impact on any relevant budgets when reviewing a request, to help inform approval
Impact on the budget
All spend has an impact on any relevant budgets based on the metadata attached to it, whether it is a expense claim, invoice or card payment.
Budgets are impacted based on the date of the expense, which in most cases falls on a specific budget period. For some cases, such as invoices, a specific period can be set to spread the impact over multiple months or budget periods. In this case the amount will be spread evenly across the defined invoice period.
E.g.
Invoice amount: 12000
Invoice period: 01/01/2025 -> 31/12/2025
Budget periods:
24/25 = 01/04/2024 -> 31/03/2026
25/26 = 01/04/2025 -> 31/03/2026
Budget granularity: monthly
In this case the invoice will be spread evenly across each month (1000) with 9 of those months falling in the 24/25 budget and 3 of those months falling in the 25/26 budget.
Access & Permissions
Budget visibility
Role | Can see budgets? | Which budgets? |
Account Owner | ✅ | All budgets in the company |
Admin | ✅ | All budgets in the company |
Controller | ✅ | All budgets in the company |
Budget Owner (any role) | ✅ | Only budgets they are assigned to as owners |
Cost Center Owner / Viewer | ✅ | Only the budget lines (& sub-lines) impacting their cost center if the option has been ticked (not default) |
Sub-budget Viewer | ✅ | Only budget lines (& sub-lines) they are assigned to as viewers |
Requester (not a budget owner) | ❌ |
|
Budget editing
Role | Can edit budgets? | Which budgets? |
Account Owner | ✅ | All budgets |
Admin | ✅ | All budgets |
Controller | ✅ | All budgets |
Budget Owner (any role) | ✅ | Only budgets they own |
Cost Center Owner / Viewer | ❌ |
|
Sub-budget Viewer | ❌ |
|
Requester (not a budget owner) | ❌ |
|
Assigning budget owners
When creating / editing a budget, you can use the owner selector field to search for and select a company member. The members available to you depend on your role:
Role | Can assign anyone as budget owner? | Details |
Account Owner / Admin / Controller | ✅ Yes — full member list | Can search and add any company member |
Cost Center Owner / Viewer | ✅ Yes — full member list | Can search and add any company member (because they have full member visibility via cost center access) |
Group Admin (team manager) | ⚠️ Partial | Can only add members of their managed teams. Already-assigned owners from outside their teams are still visible and can be removed. |
Budget Owner (requester, no other role) | ⚠️ Partial | Cannot add anyone. Already-assigned owners are still visible and can be removed. |
FAQ
Can I make a subscription count toward a budget based only on what is actually paid?
Yes. You can override the committed amount for each subscription card from the subscription details page. If you enable Budget commitment and set the Amount per period to 0, the subscription will no longer contribute a fixed committed amount to the budget. In that case, only the actual paid amount will be reflected in the budget.
