Budget & off-platform spend

The Budget tab captures the spend your ad platforms don't see - retainers, sponsorships, print, events - and tracks all of it against a plan, so attribution and ROAS reflect your real costs.

Where it stands

Budget shows in the Work zone as Coming soon. The tab is built, but it has not yet been proven against a real client's month of spend, so it is not offered until it has been. While it is marked coming soon:

• There is nowhere to set a budget or log off-platform spend.
• Budget alerts do not appear on Today, and budget pacing is left out of AI summaries and reports.
• Spend from your connected ad accounts is unaffected. It still feeds Attribution, your ROAS and the Online shop tab exactly as before.
• Any off-platform spend that was already logged still counts.

The rest of this page describes how the tab will work when it launches.

What belongs here

Spend on your connected ad accounts (Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok) is picked up on its own from those accounts - you never log it here. The Budget tab is for everything else: retainers, print, events, sponsorship, PR. Until the first entry or budget exists, the tab says so and points you at the log form.

Spend channels

On first visit, the platform seeds a channel for each connected ad platform plus common offline categories. You can rename, add or retire channels to match how you actually budget. A channel tied to a dashboard surface shows that surface's name (for example "Search Console").

Logging spend

Add spend entries against a channel: amount, date, a label, and optionally an end date (so a retainer spreads pro-rata across the period rather than landing in one lump).

Budgets & run-rate

Set a monthly budget per channel, and the platform tracks your run-rate - whether you're ahead of or behind plan. Variance bands flag when you drift (amber around 20%, red around 40%), and those alerts surface in Today. Roll forward last month copies the previous month's budgets into the month you're viewing; it appears once the previous month holds a budget.

Why it matters

Off-platform spend flows into Attribution, so blended ROAS accounts for every pound, not just ad spend. Budget events and variance also feed the Brain, sharpening its read on efficiency.