Budget Overview

The company-wide dashboard for what the business is actually spending — a daily burn figure, rolling trends, and a readiness panel that tells you exactly what's stopping the numbers from being complete. It's a read-only summary; the detail behind every figure lives in the Budget Ledger.

Who can use it — Anyone with budget-tracking view access. Retrying failed budget batches from the Readiness panel needs a higher-level "manage budget period locks" permission — without it the Retry failed batches button doesn't appear. See Roles & Permissions for how access is set.

Where to find it — Costs & Budget → Budget Overview in the sidebar. It's the first page in that group.

Before you start — the figures on this page are only as complete as the setup behind them:

Overhead categories and entries, pay levels, asset cost profiles, and fuel rates all need to exist before their costs can flow into the burn. Missing any of these shows up as a blocker or warning in the Budget Readiness panel, not a silent gap.
Timesheets must be approved and Day Works dockets signed or distributed before their cost posts — anything still submitted or draft doesn't count yet.
A daily calculation and posting run has to have happened at least once for a date to show data. If nothing has ever posted, the page tells you so instead of showing zeros.

How to use it

As At Date picks the reference date for the headline figures and the 7/30-day trend windows. Change it and hit Refresh (or just tab away — it reloads automatically) to recalculate everything below against that date.
If no snapshot exists yet for the date you pick, the page builds one on the spot — you don't need to wait for the overnight job.
Budget Health and Data Freshness sit alongside the date picker: Health reflects whether recent posting succeeded (flagging things like missing pay setup, missing asset setup, or failed batches), while Freshness tells you how current the underlying snapshot data is (Current, Recent, or Stale), plus the last posted/failed/adjusted timestamps.
Quick Actions links straight to the Budget Ledger and the setup screens (Overhead Entries, Overhead Categories, Asset Cost Profiles, Fuel Rates) that feed this page.
An expandable How Budget Tracking Works panel explains the underlying pipeline — set up inputs → approve operations → run daily calculation → post to the ledger → adjust safely if source costs change → review here.

Budget Readiness

This panel answers "what's stopping these numbers from being complete" with a one-click fix wherever possible, rather than leaving you to guess why a figure is $0:

Workers with approved hours but no active pay level — their wages can't be costed. Links to Compensation to assign one. Workers marked as excluded from payroll (paid via a combined overhead entry instead) are never flagged here.
Machines with hours but no cost profile — ownership, servicing and fuel count as $0 for these machines while their operator's wages still count. Links to Asset Costs to add a profile. A machine is covered either by its own profile or by rate defaults on its asset category.
Machines burning fuel with no matching fuel rate — fuel costs $0 until a rate is added for that fuel type. Links to the Fuel Rates tab on Asset Costs.
Failed budget batches — one or more dates failed to post or adjust, listed with their dates. If you hold the retry permission, a Retry failed batches button re-runs every failed date and clears the ones whose cause is now fixed.
Informational notes appear too: submitted timesheets still awaiting approval, budget batches still pending, a snapshot running behind the current date, posting lagging behind calculation, or timesheet entries posted under the legacy "all ordinary hours" fallback because per-bucket hours weren't captured.

When nothing needs attention, the panel shows a plain "All cost streams flowing" confirmation instead of a list.

Headline figures

Three cards summarise the burn as at your selected date:

Daily Burn (Company) — total cost for that single day, built only from approved actuals. If timesheets are still awaiting approval, a pending badge shows the count sitting outside this figure.
7-Day Trend — rolling total for the 7 days ending on the reference date.
30-Day Trend — rolling total for the 30 days ending on the reference date.

Below the cards, an amber panel spells out exactly what this number includes (overhead entries, approved labor, approved asset costs, completed float bookings, approved supplier invoices, approved subcontract claims) and what it excludes (hire equipment, draft invoices, unapproved timesheets, and the revenue/billable side), along with the amortisation method in use and the calculation version. This keeps the headline number honest about its scope — per-job detail lives in the breakdown panels underneath it, not in this figure.

Cost breakdowns

All of the panels below use the same rolling 30-day window ending on your selected date, and pull from the posted Budget Ledger rather than from live, unposted data:

Composition — total burn split across Wages, Assets, and Fixed Overhead, plus Subcontractors, Materials, and Float when the tenant uses those streams.
Top Categories — the largest fixed-overhead cost categories driving the as-at snapshot (top 5).
By Cost Code — the top 10 cost codes by total burn over the window, with untagged entries rolled into a single Untagged bucket.
Labor Split and Asset Split — the top 5 projects by wages cost and by asset cost respectively, with anything not tied to a job grouped as Unallocated.

None of these panels let you drill into a single project on this page — for the full transaction-level detail behind any figure, including adjustments and "Explain Calculation" formulas, open the Budget Ledger.

Connected pages

Budget Ledger — the transaction-level detail behind every figure on this page, including batch history and adjustments.
Asset Costs — where machine cost profiles and fuel rates are set up (Readiness panel links here for asset gaps).
Overhead — overhead categories, entries, and cost codes that drive the Fixed Overhead and cost-code breakdowns.
Compensation — where pay levels are assigned (Readiness panel links here for wage gaps).
Projects — the jobs that Labor and Asset Split figures are grouped against.

Tips & common mistakes

A number looks low or missing? Check the Budget Readiness panel first — a $0 or absent figure almost always traces back to a missing pay level, cost profile, or fuel rate rather than a real zero cost.
Daily Burn seems to be missing recent work? It only counts approved actuals. Submitted-but-not-approved timesheets show as a pending count on the card rather than being added in.
This page won't let you pick a single project. It's a company-wide view — project-level figures only appear as the top 5 rows inside Labor Split, Asset Split, and Cost Code. For a specific job's full cost history, use the Budget Ledger's project filter instead.
Retry button not showing on a failed batch? It's restricted to users who can manage budget period locks — ask a finance manager to run it, or action the underlying data gap listed above it, which self-heals on the next posting run.