Budget alerts

Flowtly Editorial Team3 min

Flowtly checks your budgets for you and tells you when one goes off plan, so you do not have to open the budget page to find out. You are notified when spending runs ahead of the plan, or when the margin a budget was planned to deliver is no longer there.

Alerts arrive as notifications: in the bell menu at the top of the workspace, and as a push notification on the devices where you allowed them.

When alerts are sent

Flowtly evaluates every budget once a day, in the morning. A budget is checked over its own planning period, and the period being checked is the one that is currently running, so a problem is reported while you can still act on it rather than after the period closes. The period that has just ended is checked as well, because late invoices and categorisation keep changing its figures for a while.

Each budget raises at most one notification per condition per day. If nothing has changed, nothing is sent.

What triggers an alert

Three conditions produce a notification.

  • Spending over plan. The costs recorded against the budget exceed what was planned for the period by more than 10%. Above 30% over plan, the alert is marked critical.
  • Margin below target. For a period that has finished, the margin the budget actually delivered is at least 5 percentage points below the margin it was planned to deliver. A gap of 15 points or more is critical.
  • Margin at risk. For the period that is still running, the costs recorded so far already exceed the planned costs by at least 5% of the planned income. In other words, even if every planned invoice is paid in full, the margin is already that far below plan. A gap of 15 points or more is critical.

A budget with no plan for the period raises nothing, and neither does a budget that plans only one side of the books when the check needs both. Income arriving later than planned is not an alert on its own: an under-recovered month shows up through the margin checks, not as a separate notification.

Each notification names the budget and the period, shows the actual figure against the planned one and the size of the gap, and offers one plain next step. It links straight to the budget so you can see the detail behind it. It never states a cause, and it never changes a budget, a plan or an allocation.

Who receives an alert

A budget can have its own list of alert recipients. When that list is set, only those people are notified.

When it is not set, the alert goes to everyone in the organization who can manage budgets. An administrator or owner qualifies, because those roles include budget management.

Recipients are re-checked when the alert is sent. Someone who no longer has access to that budget, or who has left the organization, is skipped.

Repeats and dismissal

The same alert is not sent again day after day. Once a condition has been reported, you hear about it again only when it gets meaningfully worse: when it escalates from a warning to critical, or when it deteriorates by at least another 10 points beyond the figure you were last told about.

If a budget comes back within plan, nothing is sent to announce it. The condition is simply closed, and if it returns later it is reported again as a fresh alert.

Dismissing an alert makes it stay dismissed for you. You will not be notified about it again unless it escalates to critical, which is new information rather than a repeat.

Turning alerts off

There are two ways to stop budget alert notifications.

  • Per budget. Proactive alerts can be switched off for a single budget by someone who can manage budgets. They are on by default for every budget that has a plan.
  • Organization-wide quiet period. While the organization is inside its notification quiet period, nothing is pushed. An alert that came up during the quiet period is delivered on the first check after the window closes, so it is delayed rather than lost.

Muting through notification preferences affects delivery only. The alert still appears in the in-app notification list, and the condition is still visible on the budget itself.

When the figures may be incomplete

Budget alerts are only as current as the data behind them. Every alert states the date the figures are current to.

An alert says that the figures may be incomplete when bank or import data has not arrived recently, when the period contains transactions that are not assigned to any budget (the count is named), or when no bank or import data has arrived at all. An alert carrying any of those notes is never marked critical: an incomplete picture is reported as a warning, because the final figure may well be better than it looks.

If this happens often, check the bank connection and assign the outstanding transactions to a budget. The alerts become sharper as soon as the underlying data is complete.

Example use cases

  • Learning that a client project has gone over its cost plan while the month is still running, instead of when the books are closed.
  • Spotting that a retainer stopped covering the work being delivered against it, before the next renewal conversation.
  • Routing a department's budget alerts to the department lead instead of every budget manager in the organization.
  • Keeping a tightly planned campaign budget under watch without opening it every day.

Connection map

Refers toUses upDerived fromPart of
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
invoice billed to counterparty. invoice taxed by tax-group. cost spends against budget. cost owed to counterparty. bank-transaction reconciled to invoice. bank-connection imports bank-transaction. contract schedules payment-schedule-line. contract agreed with counterparty. contract attached to budget. budget raises budget-alert. budget covers project. counterparty defaults to budget. counterparty defaults to project. invoice billed from project. project linked to budget. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty.billed totaxed byspends againstowed toreconciled toimportsschedulesagreed withattached toraisescoversdefaults todefaults tobilled fromlinked tobecomessold toIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent.InvoiceCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartyTTax group — The tax treatment applied to a line, so rates are set once rather than per document.Tax groupCCost — Money the organisation owes or has spent, tracked against a budget.CostBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetBBank transaction — A movement on a connected bank account. Matching it to an invoice or a cost is what makes the books agree with the bank.Bank transactionBBank connection — The consented link to one bank that transactions arrive through. It can stop working on its own — a consent expires or is withdrawn — so it reports whether it is still working.Bank connectionCContract — The financial terms of an engagement: a structured set of payment schedule lines, in one direction or the other.ContractPPayment schedule line — One dated amount on a contract, in a direction — money owed to a supplier, or due from a client.Payment schedule lineBBudget alert — A notice that a budget has gone off plan - spending over the planned amount, or a margin below the one that was planned. It is raised by a daily check rather than by anyone asking for it.Budget alertPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.Deal

Related terms