Budget

Cash Runway's Budget at /budget is one editable surface for both planning and review. Open it to:

• Build (or rebuild) your annual plan — auto-build from historical cadence, last year's actuals, or a hand-edited target.
• Hand-edit individual cells when a number needs to differ from the seed.
• Watch actuals roll in month by month and see where the variance sits.

Heads-up: earlier docs split this into a read-only Tracker at /budget and an editable Builder at /budget/builder. Both pages were collapsed into a single surface at /budget — the Builder's spreadsheet became the canonical view, and the Tracker's review panels are now reached directly from the dashboard's 13-week chart.

Day-one walkthrough

1. Open /budget

The first time you land on the page, Cash Runway seeds your budget automatically. Every Xero account with a recognisable P&L type gets a row, and twelve cells per row are filled with a cadence-derived prediction (the same math the dashboard's forecast uses). Common cash-only lines also get seeded if a baseline exists for them — payroll-related accounts, GST/PAYG payable, owner-draw equity accounts.

Top toolbar: bulk-adjust controls, auto-build button, last-year reference toggle, year switcher (current FY ↔ next FY), and a Budget summary card. The summary card's headline follows whichever category the trend chart is showing — Total Revenue, Total GP, Total Costs, or Total Profit — so the figure always matches the chart you're looking at. Body: the per-account spreadsheet — every unlocked cell is editable inline.

2. Auto-build or hand-edit

Auto-build is the fast path for first-time setup or for a fresh start:

• Cadence — re-runs the seed math, projecting each line from its median-preferred typical spend (the robust centre used elsewhere in the app) so a few large one-off transactions don't over-project the line. Lines whose median is zero fall back to the average. Useful after a Xero re-sync.
• Last year — copies your prior-FY actuals into this year's budget cells. Cost rows use the same outflow lens the chart displays (refunds and reimbursements coded to expense accounts aren't counted as costs), so a Last year + 0% growth budget reproduces the chart's "Last year" line.
• Last year + growth — last year × (1 + your growth %).
• Blended — average of cadence and last year + growth.

The strategy you choose is persisted on the budget. A daily cron re-applies it as time advances, so the rolling-12 window stays aligned without operator intervention.

Hand-editing is straightforward: click any unlocked cell and type. Edits are debounced (500ms) and committed automatically. Once you edit a cell, the cadence re-seed will never overwrite it.

3. Use Bulk adjust for multi-month changes

The bulk-adjust toolbar applies one of three patterns across a row (or the whole budget):

• Even — divide a delta across every unlocked month.
• Linear target — lerp from the first unlocked month to a target you specify.
• Linear rate — propagate a % growth rate month-on-month from the first unlocked cell.

Locked months are skipped automatically — bulk adjust never overwrites history.

4. Toggle Show last year reference to anchor against actuals

The toggle adds a faint Last yr: $X line under every cell. Useful for sanity-checking your numbers against what actually happened — especially for seasonal lines (Sales in December, Wages in March hiring season, etc.).

5. Close a month when you're done reconciling

Each month's column header carries a small status chip: ✓ for locked, ~ for grace (month-end + 7 days), · for the current in-progress month. Clicking the chip during the grace window gives you a Close month button — force-lock this month's cells now without waiting for the 7-day grace window to elapse. Reopening a locked month is allowed but audit-logged.

6. Plan next year + carry forward your notes

When you're ready to start next year's plan, click the next-FY pill on the year switcher. Cash Runway:

• Creates the next-FY budget by running the cadence seed for that year.

• Surfaces any row-level notes from this year as carry-forward suggestions:

  3 notes from last year — carry forward?

  Sales — Last year you noted: "Big Christmas order in Dec" [Use this note →] [Dismiss]

For each suggestion, click Use this note → to copy the note onto the new year's row, or Dismiss to ignore it. Either choice is permanent — the suggestion won't re-appear next time you open the page.

Operator notes — three scopes

Notes are small dot icons that expand to a textarea popover. Three scopes:

• Cell note — context for a specific month's number ("Q3 push budget for Trade Shows", "rent goes up Aug 1").
• Row note — context for an entire line ("Sales budget assumes the May product launch ships on time"). Row notes carry forward year-over-year via the suggestion banner.
• Header note — context for the whole budget ("Approved by board 2026-04-15").

The auto-lock rule

Each month's cells auto-lock when the month-end + 7 days has passed (in UTC). This freezes historical data so variance math always compares apples to apples. The 7-day grace gives operators a week to reconcile late transactions before the month is closed.

You can force-close a month early (column-header chip) or reopen a locked month if you need to adjust historical numbers — but reopening a month is audit-logged.

Cash-only lines

Unlike a pure P&L budget, Cash Runway's Budget includes cash-only lines that don't hit the P&L but do hit your bank account:

• GST + PAYG payable (the tax buckets you collect now, remit later).
• Loan principal repayments.
• Owner draws (equity, not expense).
• Capex / fixed-asset purchases.

These appear in a separate Cash-only adjustments category at the bottom of the grid. They're excluded from Net Profit calculations but included in the runway numbers — which is the right shape for cashflow planning.

VIEWER role

Members with the VIEWER role can open /budget but can't edit anything. The toolbar and the grid's edit affordances are hidden — the spreadsheet reads as a static snapshot.

Related

• The dashboard — the 13-week cash runway chart that cross-references the budget's planned vs actual.
• AR insights — overdue invoice tracking, which feeds the forecasts the budget compares against.