Today Vantage announces the launch of Budgets: Customers can now optionally choose to create and assign a Budget to a Cost Report. Once a Budget is assigned, customers have the ability track how their costs are trending for a particular service, business unit or team towards their prescribed budget.
Before, Vantage gave customers the ability to set filters for cost reports in order to track spend for a specific project, team or feature. However, any budgets were entered and tracked in a different system such as Ramp, Anaplan or a spreadsheet. This required teams to take the data from Vantage and pull it into another system in order to see how costs were tracking towards the budget.
Create a budget and link it to a Cost Report in the console.
Now, customers can create monthly budgets inside of Vantage and optionally assign them to cost reports. Once a Budget is assigned to a Cost Report, Vantage will display the Budget alongside costs and forecasts so you can easily track your costs in a single tool. A single Budget can consist of multiple periods, with each period having its own budgeted amount - giving users the ability to have auto-adjusting budgets as time goes on.
Budgets are available for free to all Vantage users, including users in the free tier, at the time that this blog post is published. For more details, please see the Vantage documentation on Budgets: https://docs.vantage.sh/budgets
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today, Vantage is launching Budgets. Budgets give Vantage users the ability to create monthly budgets and assign them to specific Cost Reports.
2. Who is the customer?
Budgets are available to all Vantage users, including those in the free tier.
3. How much does this cost?
Budgets are free for all Vantage users.
4. How do I create a Budget and assign it to a Cost Report?
Visit https://console.vantage.sh/financial_planning/budgets to create budgets. From there you can assign a budget to a Cost Report.
5. Can I Import budgets from other systems, Excel or CSV?
Budgets do not support importing at this time, but If you use budgeting software and would like Vantage to automatically pull in this data please email support@vantage.sh.
6. Can I have variable budgets which change month-to-month?
Yes, you can define multiple budget periods, one for each month, and specify the amount for each period.
7. I budget based on the quarter. Does Vantage support quarterly budgets?
When creating a Budget you can define multiple periods for each quarter. For each period you can enter the average monthly amount for that quarter.
8. Can I see how well a cost report has been performing to budget?
Yes, after linking a budget to a cost report you can see the MTD performance of the budget by visiting the cost report page or from the Budgets page.
9. Can I set an alert based on a cost report going over budget?
Not yet, however this is currently under development. If you are interested in early access please email support@vantage.sh.
10. Who can create a Budget?
Anyone with “Editor” role or above can create, edit, and delete budgets.
11. Can I control which teams can see Budgets?
Budgets are scoped to a workspace and access to that workspace can be controlled via teams. This allows you to create Budgets in specific workspaces in which specific teams have access.
12. Can I create a Budget for the past?
Yes, you can create a Budget for a previous period, however once you create a period and the time passes you can not edit this period.
13. How do monthly budgets change when months have different days?
Budget amounts are the same no matter the amount of days in the month. However, when viewing a cost report the daily budget amount will be adjusted based on the number of days in the month.
