Budgets

Updated at August 7th, 2025

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Table of Contents

Budget creation Opening balances Budget view Purchase Order vs Supplier invoice budget calculations Rejected/Cancelled claims Budget Reporting Including items without Budgets in the Budget Report Over Budget Warnings Updates to Budget Module Budget Changes Included in the Audit Trail Report

Whether your business is running an event, managing construction sites or wanting to give your teams more autonomy, ProSpend's budgets really help your people to make informed decisions

No longer is your budget a hidden excel spreadsheet, your employees get visibility before making a purchase.

Budget creation

An administrator is able to create new budgets from the setup menu.

A budget can be allocated to a Category, given a name and a from and to date

When the budget is Saved a new Budget is created with:-

The expense types from the Category
The cost centres assigned to the Category

The budget amounts can either be updated on-screen or exported to an excel file and then re-imported into ProSpend via the Upload button.

Opening balances

Opening balances can be included in a current budget. The opening balance amount is included as 'Spent' in the budget calculation

Budget view

When a user uses an expense type in any enabled module, cash, card, supplier invoices or purchase orders, the budget calculations are displayed for them on screen.

The amounts displayed to the user is based on the Cost Centre of the expense and the expense type selected. The amounts shown are in whole dollars (rounded up) and are net of GST.

Purchase Order vs Supplier invoice budget calculations

When a purchase order is created and approved, the amount of the Purchase Order is committed to the budget. When an Invoice is matched to a Purchase Order and the amounts are equal the Invoice is not calculated as part of the Budget.

If a Purchase Order is 'closed' by the user and there is a remaining balance, this balance is allocated back to the Budget as available.

Rejected/Cancelled claims

When any claim is Cancelled the expense amount/s are allocated back to the Budget as available.

When any claim is still in the Rejected status the expense amount is still allocated to the Budget as Pending, until the claim is cancelled if required and then the amount is allocated back to the Budget as available.

Budget Reporting

Budget reporting is available under the Administrator Reports menu.

There are a range of report filters and view options.

Including items without Budgets in the Budget Report

When generating a budget report, there is now an option to include items that don't have a budget setup

If the 'include unbudgeted' box is ticked when the report is generated, all expenses that don't have budgets will be shown with $0 as the current and original budget amounts.

The 'Spent' and 'Pending' bars in the chart will show the unbudgeted amounts in a different color.

Over Budget Warnings

The users can now see an orange warning icon within a claim if it contains expenses that went over budget.

The user can still submit and approve the claim as usual.

Updates to Budget Module

ProSpend’s budgets module drives increas5ed visibility for end-users and decision makers. As it were, users could set up budgets only by Category, Cost-Centre and Expense Type. With this release, users will also be able to set up budgets by the Project Group, Project ID and Activity Code dimensions.

The change rolled out with this release is Opt-In so, for all existing ProSpend databases, things will remain unchanged until you request the change. If you currently do not have the Budgets Module and would like it set up or would like more dimensions enabled please contact Support.

If you use the new dimensions enabled for budgets, you will not be able to continue using the old Budget Allocations Screen, pictured below, as it accommodates for the pre-existing dimensions.

Instead you will have 2 options, (1) to enable the new Budget Allocations Screen or (2) to keep the new Budget Allocations Screen disabled and set-up/manage budgets by exporting and importing our budget template files via the screen pictured below. ProSpend Support team can can help you with this file if need be.

With the new Budget Allocation Screen, everything else will remain the same as it was before. You can click on the button below to access the release notes that cover how the budget module works, outside of the new Budget Allocation Screen, shown below.

The dimensions shown and made available under “Filter Allocations” (red box below) are adjusted via the back-end by the support team. As you can see, the picture on the left has all possible dimensions made available and the picture on the right only has 3 dimensions. Please reach out to them if you need these adjusted.

Selections for each dimension can be made at the top by toggling the drop downs under Filter Allocations or by selecting the required dimensions within the corresponding lines, under the pertaining dimensions’ columns in the table at the bottom. Once lines with the desired combination of dimensions are displayed in the table, the user can allocate budgets by entering the amount in that line, under the “Amount” and/or “Opening Balance” columns.

For those dimensions that are enabled via the back end, but are not relevant for the particular budget being set up, users can choose to leave those dimensions “Unspecified” or select “All” where relevant. In the example below, we have set up a budget for all Mileage expenses regardless of the Cost-Centre, Project Group and Project.

Please note, the option to set-up/manage budgets via export and import of the budget template file is still available in the new Budget Allocation Screen under the actions button, as can be seen above.

The third change to the budget module has been made to Budget Reports. While they are still accessed from the navigation bar on the left, we have now enabled users to be able to report on multiple budgets within the same report. Please see below.

If you have questions in relation to any of the above, or would like to have the Budgets Module set-up or changed, kindly contact ProSpend Support.

Budget Changes Included in the Audit Trail Report

Any changes made to the budget or budget allocations are now reflected in the audit trail report for admins. In the "Audit Trail Report" for admins, there are now 2 new audit types -

Budget - this includes all the changes made in the budget details section like the budget name, budget period, etc.
Budget Allocation - this includes all the changes made to the budget allocation amounts.

This report shows when the changes were made, what the changes were and who the changes were made by. This can also be exported to Excel.

To know more about the audit trail report and other admin reports, click on the "Learn more" button below -