--- title: How to set a budget canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/how-to/how-to-set-a-budget/" description: "Create a spending target for the organization or a cost group, choose what it covers, and decide when it should tell you." --- A budget in CloudMonitor is a target with alerts attached. It tells you when spend crosses a line; it never stops anything. :::note[Cost group owners only] You need to be an **Owner** of the cost group you're changing. Admins can manage every cost group. Owners are set from **Manage team** on the cost group. Admins can budget any scope, including the whole organization. Cost group owners can budget the groups they own. ::: ![Step one of the New budget wizard, showing Name, Amount, read-only Currency and the Period selector](../../../../assets/docs/budget-wizard.png) ## Step 1 — Basics Settings ▸ **Budgets** ▸ **New budget**. **Name** — up to 50 characters, e.g. `AI & SaaS spend FY26`. Name it after what it covers and the period, because you'll have several. **Amount** — a whole number greater than zero. No decimals. **Currency** — read-only. Budgets use the workspace reporting currency. If it's wrong, change it before creating the budget rather than after — see [how to set your currency and financial year](/docs/how-to/how-to-set-your-currency-and-financial-year/). **Period** — **Monthly**, **Quarterly** or **Annual**. This is the budget's own cycle and it is not affected by the top-bar date filter. ## Step 2 — Scope **Scope** — **Org** or **Cost group**. Org is offered to admins only. **Scope target** — which cost group. The picker offers only groups you can manage. An org-scoped budget shows **Whole organisation** and needs no target. **Providers** — optional. Leave everything unticked to track total spend in scope; tick specific providers to budget just those. Only providers with actual spend in your data appear. Narrowing to providers has a side effect worth knowing: the pacing chart on [Budgets & Forecasts](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/budgets-and-forecasts/) doesn't apply to budgets with a provider set. ## Step 3 — Alerts **Alerting basis** — **Accrued** (usage priced up, near-daily) or **Billed** (invoice-confirmed). Accrued is the right default for alerting. Waiting for an invoice to tell you you're over is waiting until it's too late to act. Billed is for reconciliation. **Alert thresholds** — each is a type, a percentage and one or more channels. - **Actual** fires when spend already incurred crosses the percentage. - **Forecasted** fires when the projected run rate crosses it. CloudMonitor starts you with a sensible set: **Actual at 50%, 80% and 100%, plus Forecasted at 100%**. :::tip[Why Forecasted sits at 100% and not lower] The forecast is a rate, not a running total — it sits near its final value from day one. A Forecasted threshold below 100% would fire in the first days of every period on every budget merely on track to spend its full allowance. It would alert on the healthy case. Forecasted at 100% asks the only question worth asking: are we projected to go over? How much of the period has elapsed when it trips tells you whether that's a watch item or a real problem. ::: Percentages can be anything from 0.01% to 1000%, and they don't have to ascend — Actual 80 and Forecasted 80 together is perfectly reasonable. Each threshold also carries channel toggles — Teams, Email, Webhook. :::caution[Set the channels, but don't rely on them yet] The channel toggles record where an alert *should* go. **Automatic delivery isn't wired up yet** — there is no scheduled job posting to Teams, sending email or calling a webhook. Thresholds are real and evaluated: open [Budgets & Forecasts](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/budgets-and-forecasts/) and you'll see which ones have been breached. But a budget will not come and find you. Until delivery ships, treat a budget as something you **check** on a rhythm rather than something that tells you. A recurring calendar reminder to open that screen is the practical answer. See [what isn't available yet](/docs/reference/whats-not-available-yet/). ::: ## Step 4 — Create **Create budget**. Nothing is saved before this. ## Editing later Settings ▸ Budgets ▸ the row's **⋮** menu. Editing is a single page with the same fields. ## The currency trap If a budget's stored currency differs from the workspace reporting currency, it can't be evaluated. The list shows **Requires repair** instead of an amount, and editing raises **Currency conversion required**. CloudMonitor never converts currencies. Save stays disabled until you retype the amount in the new currency and tick the box confirming you converted it yourself. That's friction on purpose — a silently wrong exchange rate in a budget is worse than a blocked save. Change the reporting currency and every budget set in the old one needs this treatment. Do it deliberately, not casually. ## What a budget does not do It doesn't cap, block or throttle anything. Crossing 100% notifies people and nothing else. If you need a hard limit, that's a control in your cloud provider. Alerts are also evaluated against the budget's own period and scope, which is why the top-bar filters are grayed out on the Budgets report — see [Budgets & Forecasts](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/budgets-and-forecasts/).