Budget and expenses

Projects need Org plan.

A project budget is a set of categories, each with a planned amount, against which you record expenses. Both live on the project’s Budget tab.

The budget: spend to date, by category, over timeOpen /p in the app

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Categories

Seven categories are suggested — personnel, travel, consultants, equipment, training, overhead and other — but the list is not fixed. Additional categories can be created, and recording an expense against a category that does not exist creates it.

Two behaviours apply:

Names are matched loosely. “Travel”, “travel” and “ Travel “ resolve to the same category, as names are trimmed, collapsed and lowercased before comparison. A budget therefore does not fragment across spelling variants.

Categories carry a code prefix. The built-ins are fixed: PER, TRV, CON, EQP, TRN, OVH, OTH. A category you create derives its prefix from the first three letters of its name.

Planned amounts and the overview

A category created by recording an expense has no planned amount. Until every category has one, there is no budget overview: no total, burn rate or status. The mechanism and the remedy are documented in Milestones.

Once amounts are set, each category reports a burn status: on track, underspent, overspent, or no data.

A budget category, with the switch that gives it a planned amountOpen /p in the app

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Note the control’s location: once a budget contains categories, Add Budget Category is no longer a separate button but the menu portion of the Add Expense split button.

Currency is fixed at project level rather than per category. Currencies cannot be mixed within one budget.

Expenses

An expense records an amount, a description, a date, and optionally a vendor reference and the milestone it belongs to. The milestone association is what enables spend-against-plan reporting per phase rather than in total only.

Recording an expense — category, milestone, and the receiptOpen /p in the app

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Entries can be created from the receipt. Attaching one and selecting Scan with AI reads the document and populates the fields below it. This is equivalent to autofill when posting an opportunity, and the same caution applies: the output is a draft requiring review. Receipts must be PDF, JPEG or PNG, up to 15 MB.

Receipts are served behind the project’s authentication rather than from a public URL, and can be replaced or removed subsequently.

An expense can be edited or reassigned to a different category, so a misfiled cost is corrected rather than deleted and re-entered.

Removing and reordering

Categories can be deleted individually or in bulk, and reordered. The order determines how the budget is presented to any reader, including within a snapshot, and should be set deliberately.

Expenses can be deleted individually, and a receipt can be removed from an expense without deleting the expense. This applies where a receipt was attached to the wrong line or contains material that should not be shared.

Deleting a category containing expenses warrants care: the expenditure is retained, but the category it was reported under is not. Where the categories match a structure agreed with a funder, move the expenses first.

Importing an existing budget

An existing budget need not be re-entered. Budget lines can be bulk-imported from CSV or spreadsheet data. Each row requires at least a category and a currency; the planned amount is optional.

This is the appropriate approach where a funder has supplied the budget structure: import their categories and record against them, so that reporting aligns without a subsequent mapping exercise.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a frozen copy of the budget at a point in time, retained for donor reporting.

A live budget continues to change. A report issued in March describes figures that may since have altered, and without a snapshot there is no record of what was accurate at the time of issue. Taking a snapshot when reporting preserves the figures quoted.

Snapshots are read-only once taken, and can be listed and deleted.

Limits

Budget lines per project	200
Expenses per budget line	500
Snapshots per project	50

These limits are not normally reached. A budget imported from a spreadsheet with one line per transaction can reach the first: categories are aggregates, and per-transaction detail belongs in expenses.

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