How to set a budget

A budget in CloudMonitor is a target with alerts attached. It tells you when spend crosses a line; it never stops anything.

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 1: Basics

Budgets & Forecasts ▸ the Manage budgets tab ▸ 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.

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 organization and needs no target.

Providers: optional, and organization-wide budgets only. 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. On cost-group scope the picker is inactive: a cost-group budget tracks every provider routed to that group.

If your bill has only one provider, the field isn’t shown at all: narrowing to that provider and tracking everything would come to the same number. It appears once a second provider has spend.

Narrowing to providers has a side effect worth knowing: the pacing chart on Budgets & 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 80% and 100%, plus Forecasted at 100%.

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 delivery-channel toggles. Select Teams, Slack, Email, or any combination for the people who should receive that threshold. CloudMonitor sends only the selected destination types; the Teams and Slack webhooks and the email recipients themselves are configured in Settings ▸ Alerts. Teams, Slack and Email appear here only while their organization alerting is turned on.

For a Cost Group budget, a Cost Group-specific Teams webhook, Slack webhook or email recipients replace the organization destination for that same channel only. Selecting several channels sends one alert to each selected channel. If no active destination exists for a selected channel, the alert remains visible in CloudMonitor but cannot be delivered to that channel.

Step 4: Create

Create budget. Nothing is saved before this.

Editing later

Budgets & Forecasts ▸ Manage budgets ▸ the row’s ⋮ menu, or the ⋮ menu on any Business Unit row, which opens that unit’s budget directly.

Editing shows the same sections: Basics, Scope, Alerts. Back and Next walk them in order, or click a section name to jump straight there. Save sits alongside and saves the whole budget from wherever you are, so changing one field takes one click. If a field on another section is blocking the save, that section is flagged in the header.

What the budget covers is set when you create it and can’t be changed later. Basics states it on one line (Budgeting Sandbox / Dev · All providers) rather than offering the scope controls back. Everything already recorded against the budget, its spend history and the alerts it has raised, is measured against that coverage; re-pointing it would quietly change what all of it means. To budget something else, create another budget.

Providers stays editable on an organization-wide budget, as long as your bill has more than one provider to choose between. On a cost-group budget it isn’t offered at all: that budget tracks every provider routed to the group. Wherever it isn’t offered, the coverage line reports the providers instead, so a budget that was narrowed earlier still shows what it covers.

Back, Cancel and Save all return you to the screen you opened the budget from.

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.