Budgets

Budgets enable you to track spend against important business metrics and optionally notify the right people when something goes off track.

Each Budget includes:

• A link to a View, which determines the spend tracked by the Budget and the teams notified
• A name that is unique within each View
• A set of planned limits that associate a month with an amount of spend
• Optionally, a set of alerts that determine the when to notify your teams

Viewers, Editors, and Admins can access their organization’s Budgets at https://app.cloudzero.com/budgets.

Overview

Upon arrival at the Budgets page you will see two main areas of the page:

• the left column containing a list of Budgets grouped by the View they belong to
• and a sidebar on the right containing a detailed view of a given budget for the currently selected View.

Selecting a View

In order to change which View is currently “active” in the right sidebar, simply click on the box in the Budget Listing that represents the View containing the Budgets you are interested in.

Selecting A Budget

After selecting a View in the Budget Listing in the left column, the View will populate in the right sidebar. By default, the first budget represented under the View will be the one selected. You are able to switch budgets via the budget selector at the top of the right sidebar, under the View name.

Sharing Views and Budgets

Once you have selected the View and Budget you wish to share, simply copy the url of the page and send it to whoever you need to share it with.

Authoring Budgets

Generating a CloudZero Budget Form

You can begin generating your Budget Form from several different places on the Budgets page:

• Click the Edit Download Budgets button at the top of the page
• Click the Set Budget for this View button under a view with no Budgets
• After selecting a View with no budgets
  • Click the Set a Budget button in the right sidebar

Taking any of these actions will open a modal where we will collect some basic information about your Budget, including:

• Which Views you would like to add or update budgets for
• Whether you want to add or update a budget, forecast, or both for each View (note that forecasts behave just like budgets - their purpose is to allow you to track your projections separately from your plans)
• Start Month and End Month for the budgets you wish to add or update
  • Please note you are limited to editing 2 years of Budgets at a time

Once your form is complete, click the Download CSV button, which will trigger a download of your new Budget Form.

Updating Budgets in the CloudZero Budget Form

The Budget Form is generated as a CSV (comma separated value) spreadsheet. You can open it with any common spreadsheet tool (Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, Google Sheets, etc).

When you download it, the Budget Form is already properly formatted for you with a table that has Views and Budgets listed vertically on the left, and the months listed horizontally as column headers across the form.

To update your budgets, simply put in the dollar amount that you wish to track against for each month in the row corresponding to the budget you wish to update. Do not edit any cells in the spreadsheet other than those in the table.

Once you are happy with your budgets, save your Budget Form as a CSV file.

Uploading a Cloudzero Budget Form

Once you have completed filling out your Budget Form, come back to the CloudZero app and on the Budgets page click the Upload Budgets button at the top of the page. This will open a modal containing a drag and drop interface for your Budget Form CSV file. You can also click into the box to access a more traditional file explorer selection interface.

Once your file is selected we will validate it and create your Budgets, if your document is invalid we will let you know which row the error occurred in.

Deleting Budgets

Simply select the budget you intend to delete, click the overflow menu, and then select and confirm "Delete Budget"