---
title: "Budgets & Forecasts"
canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/budgets-and-forecasts/"
description: "How every budget is tracking against actual spend, with a month-end projection and the alert thresholds behind it."
---

Where every budget stands against what's actually been spent, with a projection of where the period
finishes.

:::tip[A budget never stops spending]
Budgets in CloudMonitor are alert-only. Crossing a threshold notifies people; it does not block
anything, cap anything or turn anything off. If you need a hard limit, that's a control in your
cloud provider, not here.
:::

## Two ways to look at it

**Portfolio overview** shows every budget side by side.

Or pick one budget for a comparison against its own native period. That distinction matters: a
portfolio can mix monthly, quarterly and annual budgets with overlapping scopes, so the figures sit
alongside each other and are **never summed**. Adding an annual budget to a monthly one produces a
number that means nothing.

## Reading the pacing

**Cumulative spend vs budget pace** is the chart to look at. It plots spend so far against the line
you'd be on if you spent evenly through the period.

Above the line early in a month is often fine — spend is lumpy. Above the line and diverging is the
shape that matters, and it's visible here well before the total crosses the budget.

Pacing is available for org-wide and cost-group budgets without a vendor set. Narrow a budget to
specific providers and the pacing view doesn't apply.

## Accrued and billed

Budgets track two figures:

- **Accrued** — usage priced up, near-daily. This is what alerts fire on, because waiting for an
  invoice to tell you you're over is waiting too long.
- **Billed** — invoice-confirmed. This is what you reconcile against.

The **Reconciliation** tab shows them together. They should converge as a period closes; a persistent
gap is worth investigating rather than accepting.

## Thresholds

Each budget carries its own alert thresholds, of two kinds:

- **Actual** fires on spend already incurred.
- **Forecasted** fires on the projected run rate — an early warning that you're heading over.

A budget can have several, so you can be told at 50%, 80% and 100% rather than only when it's too
late.

Thresholds are configured with the budget under Settings ▸ Budgets. Admins can budget any scope;
cost group owners can budget the groups they own. See
[Roles and access](/docs/reference/roles-and-permissions/).

## "Budgets need currency repair"

If you see this, one or more budgets are stored in a different currency from your workspace's
reporting currency, and can't be evaluated.

CloudMonitor never converts currencies. Someone has to open **Manage budgets** and re-enter each
affected amount in the current reporting currency. Until then those budgets aren't being tracked —
which is worth acting on rather than dismissing.

## Filters

Only the cost basis applies here, and there's a good reason.

Each budget already carries its own period, its own scope and its own provider set. Applying the
top-bar Period would quietly turn an annual budget into a monthly comparison; applying the cost group
filter would double-scope a budget already scoped to a group. So the chips are grayed out with the
reason rather than producing plausible nonsense.

## Parts that are illustrative

Most of this page is your real data: budgets, thresholds, accrued and billed spend.

Some of the vendor-level breakdown and **AI spend per team member** is not. Per-person AI spend needs
per-seat feeds from the AI providers that aren't connected yet — you can set the budgets today, and
the spend fills in when that ingestion lands.

Each panel says which it is. Check before quoting a per-person figure.