---
title: "How do I create a budget?"
canonical: "https://support.activedemand.com/space/EC/355303430/How%20do%20I%20create%20a%20budget%3F"
format: markdown
---
> ℹ️ This is an overview of using ActiveDEMAND Budgets for planning and tracking marketing expenditures.
> ℹ️ 
> ℹ️ - ActiveDEMAND Budgets allow users to plan and track marketing expenditures, comparing actual spend against planned budgets.
> ℹ️ - Top Level Budgets can include planned expenditures, actual expenditures, and campaign budgets, with options to manage them via the Budgets tab in account settings.
> ℹ️ - Campaign Budgets are associated with specific campaigns and cannot be deleted or include other campaign budgets, but they allow for individual editing of budget and expense items.
> ℹ️ - Expense items can be automatically logged from external ad platforms by connecting and scheduling collection tasks.
> ℹ️ - Users can import or manually add budgeted and expensed items, with CSV import options available for planned expenditures.

Plan your marketing spend using ActiveDEMAND Budgets. The Budget tool allows you to plan out expenditures and track your progress compared to your plan. 

  **Top Level Budget**:   
Every account can have multiple top level budgets.
2. **Budget Items**:   
Planned expenditures
3. **Expense Items**:   
Actual Expenditures
4. **Campaign Budget:**  
Every campaign has an associated budget. A Campaign Budget does not have to be included in a Top Level Budget. A Campaign Budget can only be included in a one Top Level budget
5. **Campaign Budget Items**:  
Planned campaign expenditure
6. **Campaign Expense Items**:  
Actual Campaign Expenditures
7. **Child Account Budget**  
if a top level budget is created in an agency account, it can include child account top level budget

---

> Macro (cards)

---

## Budget Administration

In your account settings, there is a Budgets tab. This is where you can configure the Budget Attributes.

![image-20251201-213652.png](media://ff0dffa2-5606-4827-b7e3-87982ee19b41)


1. Cost Types:  
Cost types classify both Budget Items and Expense Items. A Cost Type has a Source/Medium for attribution tracking purposes
2. Budget Statuses:  
Top level budgets can be assigned a status.
3. Budget Types:  
The budget type is a classification for managing budgets.


## Top Level Budgets

A Top Level budget is used to plan expenditures for a specific period of time. A Top Level Budget can include planned expenditures (Budget Items), actual expenditures (Expense Items), and Campaign Budgets. You can create and manage all budgets from Administration → Budgets

![image-20251201-215801.png](media://1319a533-0bd3-40a0-8c07-dd93fc5ef76e)


![image-20251201-220101.png](media://8baf9037-fe47-42e3-8b30-c0717acc56f0)


The Budget Variance is the the difference between the budgeted expenditures and the actual spend. If you are including campaign budgets in your top level budget, you have the option to include/exclude the campaigns planned expenditures in the variance calculation. For example, if you have planned out your expenditures for the given time period, then you start a campaign, and in a campaign budget you plan your the spend for the campaign,  including the budgeted expenses for that campaign may over report your budgeted spend in the top level budget. Alternatively if you do not account for campaign budgeted spend in your top level budget, you would want to include the campaign budget items. 

> ℹ️ **Note:** Expense Items should only be recorded once, either in a campaign, or in the Top Level budget.

![image-20251230-141755.png](media://c1a23a93-759d-4985-a32f-7cc65ac08d25)

![image-20251230-141929.png](media://a6650cf7-212e-435f-9257-128f293a63d1)

![image-20251230-142614.png](media://11b09811-6a48-4fdf-8e9c-28ed6cdbbfbc)

If the budget is in an agency account, there will be one additional panel:

![image-20251230-142204.png](media://0bec6ca2-1cab-4d91-a04b-b1e2434e2ac6)

1. Budgeted Items
2. Expensed Items
3. External Ad Platforms
4. Campaign Budgets
5. Child Account Budgets


### 1. Budgeted Items (Planned Expenditures)

The planned expenditures editor allows you to edit the planned spend by month and cost type. The 

![image-20251208-153420.png](media://487ebb01-a2f4-4a92-ab1c-74cbaba93b56)

1. Cost Type
2. Editing Cells
3. Import CSV
4. Export to CSV


The Budget items can be edited directly in the table

![edit.gif](media://1a54386b-1ee4-4e44-bb30-9350346ee925)

### 2. Expense Items (Actual Spend)

![image-20251208-154134.png](media://d6de56c0-a87d-4654-91eb-2e8bc193ac64)

### 3. External Ad Platform Expenses

![image-20251230-142516.png](media://539e3bc8-8dee-46bc-b445-e821c466ce26)

You can automatically log spend (expense items) from external ad platforms by connecting to the platform and scheduling the collection task. 


### 4. Campaign Budgets

![image-20251201-225803.png](media://002e2d70-111a-4454-8b5c-59b458c89daa)

You can included one or more campaign budgets in your top level budget. 

> ℹ️ Note: A campaign budget can only be associated with a single top level budget


### 4. Child Account Budgets (agency accounts only)

![image-20251230-143034.png](media://1f29b8e7-ca8c-437a-8eee-e8fe49e9ac27)

For agency accounts you can include child account budgets into your top level budget.


## Campaign Budgets

Every calendar campaign has a budget. This is used for managing expenditures for a specific campaign. 

![image-20251201-230043.png](media://143da455-d5ca-4c73-8d0d-240fd3339267)

A campaign budget is essentially the same concept as a top level budget. The major differences are: 

1. A campaign budget cannot be deleted
2. A campaign budget cannot include other campaign budgets
3. Budget items can be edited and viewed individually
4. Expense items can be edited and viewed individually
5. Expense items can be linked to budget items
6. Expense items can have attached files


### Budgeted Items (Planned Expenditures)

![image-20251201-225113.png](media://b5e07786-afbc-4476-8312-c68659944bc5)

You can either add your planned expenses by importing a CSV file or by adding the items one at a time. The CSV file must be of the following format

| **Name** | **Cost Type Name** | **Amount** | **Date (**yyyy-mm-dd**)** |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |

> ℹ️ Note: CSV File Imports for budget items should NOT have a header row. The import only expects raw data in the appropriate format


### Expensed Items

Expense items can be imported or added individually.

![image-20251217-163556.png](media://81d1c524-d7e8-460d-928a-c3ed90da004e)

1. Budgeted Item  
You can associated an expense with a budget item if you wish. This may be helpful if a single item has many receipts.
2. utm_campaign  
If an expense item is in a Campaign Budget, the utm_campaign is automatically set to being the campaign UTM_CAMPAIGN parameter. You can override this if you are associating the expense to an external utm_campaign parameter. This is useful if you are doing google adwords campaigns for example


![image-20251201-230333.png](media://57991479-8b25-4de0-9731-44f222677214)

### External Ad Platform Expenses

You can automatically create expensed items for the appropriate ad platform spend by  connecting a budget to an external platform

![image-20251230-143502.png](media://d94b19a3-e298-42a5-b461-2cf1c5af3afc)

1. Ad Platform
2. Cost Type
3. Campaign Filters
4. utm_campaign
5. Frequency

The external ad platform is polled on the set frequency:

- Monthly
- Weekly
- Daily

An expense item is created for every campaign that has logged spend for the previous frequency period. The expense period is the [Poll Date - (1 day) - frequency period, Poll Date - (1 day)]. The expense item will be created using the associated Cost Type, utm_parameter, and the paid on date will be the date of the poll.

![image-20251230-144028.png](media://ab08c198-3cd7-411f-a10d-610c02da72e9)

1. Activate/Deactivate the polling
2. Frequency
3. Last poll
4. Next poll