Team Budget Tracker

Team Budget Tracker Skill

Team budgets surprise their owners for one structural reason: the official number tracks invoices (what finance has processed), while the truth includes commitments (the signed contract not yet billed, the accepted quote, the hire with an offer out) — so a team can be "under budget" while being catastrophically over-committed. The tracker runs three lanes — spent (invoiced), committed (contractually owed), planned (intended but not yet signed) — against the budget line, at the budget-tracker-design statement-grain, with the monthly close and its one-sentence read. The remaining-to-spend number the team actually needs is budget − spent − committed, and most surprise stories are the word "committed" going untracked.

What This Skill Produces

• The three-lane tracker — spent / committed / planned per category, with true-remaining computed
• The commitment intake — the rule that signatures, POs, and offers enter the tracker at commitment-time (contract-renewal-tracker intake logic, budget edition)
• The monthly close — reconcile with finance's actuals, roll the lanes, write the one sentence
• The forecast method — the year-end projection: run-rate + committed + planned, with the honesty bands

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The budget and its shape — the number, its categories (matched to how finance reports back — reconciliation dies across mismatched taxonomies), and what's in/out (headcount usually tracked separately — confirm)
• The current commitments, hunted — the signed-not-billed contracts, the annual licenses (the renewal inventory supplies these), the accepted quotes, the outstanding offers; the first tracker build is mostly this archaeology
• The spend flow — who can commit money (everyone who can sign is a tracker input source), and where invoices land
• Finance's rhythm — when actuals arrive, in what format; the close reconciles against them monthly

Framework: The Tracker Rules

1. Three lanes, one truth: spent (finance's actuals) + committed (signed/ordered/offered, dated by when it bills) + planned (the intended spend, explicitly soft) — and true remaining = budget − spent − committed (planned shown but not subtracted — it's intention, not obligation). The lane discipline is the entire fix; every budget surprise autopsy finds a commitment that lived in someone's inbox instead of the tracker.
2. Commitments enter at signature, not invoice: the intake rule — any signature/PO/offer creates its tracker row that day, with its billing schedule (the annual license bills once; the contractor bills monthly) — because the gap between commit-day and invoice-day is exactly where the surprise gestates.
3. The monthly close is reconcile-roll-read: finance's actuals vs. the spent lane (mismatches chased — often a mis-categorized invoice, occasionally a real leak) → committed items that billed move lanes → the one sentence ("on track; true remaining $84k; the Q4 contractor renewal is the next big commit") (budget-tracker-design ritual discipline, team edition).
4. Signals fire on the combined trajectory: the variance thresholds watch spent+committed against the year's elapsed fraction — a team 40% through the year with 70% committed is in trouble today, whatever the invoiced number says; that's the signal the invoice-only view structurally cannot fire.
5. The forecast is arithmetic plus honesty bands: year-end = spent + committed + (planned × its confidence) + (run-rate for the unplanned residual) — with the band stated ("$310–335k against $320k — the range is the planned-lane uncertainty") and the proposal-skeleton-grade honesty when the answer is "over": early bad news buys options (saying-no-kindly tradeoff boards for the spend that must move); November bad news buys apologies.