Raise a spend ceiling without interrupting delivery
Enterprise Tier
Sooner or later a team legitimately outgrows its ceiling: a feature launches, usage doubles for good reasons, and the budget that tracked last quarter's plan now fires alerts against this quarter's higher, agreed spend. A budget never blocks traffic, so nothing is interrupted, but a ceiling that no longer matches reality either floods the owner with false alarms or, raised carelessly, stops fine-grained cost control. The fix stays governed: the new number agreed, the change recorded, and the exception distinguishable from a silent giving-up on cost control.
Persona: Platform operator working in the Admin Dashboard, responding to a budget alert or a request from the team or business owner.
Estimated time: Minutes per adjustment, once the new ceiling is agreed.
Outcomes
By the end of this guide:
- A budget's limit is raised in place, effective immediately against spend already recorded this period.
- Tracking and alerting can be paused without discarding the budget while a ceiling is renegotiated.
- An obsolete budget is retired and, when it should not remain even as inactive, permanently deleted; every change lands in the audit trail with its reasoning recorded nearby.
Prerequisites
- Administrator access to the Admin Dashboard, typically the
super_adminorbilling_adminrole. - Agreement on the new ceiling with the finance or business owner who set the original. The operator implements the decision rather than originating it; an unagreed raise is the silent giving-up this guide exists to avoid.
Decide before adjusting
An approaching or crossed ceiling has three legitimate responses, and the adjustment is only one of them: raise the ceiling when the growth is agreed to be real and funded; investigate the cause when the growth is unexplained (the workflow in Catch spend drift before the invoice does and the audit trail behind it); or accept the overspend for the remainder of the period. The alert gives the operator and the business owner time to decide deliberately rather than having Agent Router decide for them.
Raise the limit in place
The budget detail view is where a budget is adjusted after creation.
- Open the budget's detail view and locate the configuration rail on the left.
- Edit the Spend limit in place. A change to the limit applies to the current period immediately, measured against spend already recorded, so the meter and its alerts reflect the new ceiling as soon as the limit saves.
- Edit the Budget name in place if the change makes the old name misleading (for example, when a quarterly uplift becomes permanent).
Because a budget alerts rather than blocks, traffic is never interrupted in either direction: requests continue to flow throughout, and raising the limit simply resets the burn and alerting against the new, higher ceiling.
Pause tracking during a renegotiation
The Status toggle on the detail view pauses tracking and alerting without discarding the budget. This is the right state while a ceiling is being renegotiated: the policy and its history stay in place, but a stale number stops firing misleading alerts against spend the business has already agreed to fund. Reactivate the budget once the new ceiling is set.
Retire a budget
Deactivate policy on the detail view (or via the Active/Inactive controls on the budgets list) retires the budget without removing it: the right end state for a cost centre that no longer exists or a per-person budget superseded by a team one. Retirement is preferable to a ceiling raised so high it never fires, because a budget that cannot fire reads as active governance while providing none. Inactive budgets stay under the Inactive filter and can be reactivated later.
When the budget should not remain even as inactive—test budgets, superseded policies that will never return—remove it permanently after deactivation:
- Deactivate the budget first. An active budget cannot be permanently deleted; the console refuses the attempt and asks you to deactivate it first.
- Switch to the Inactive filter on Usage → Budgets, open the budget's ⋯ menu, and select Delete permanently….
- Confirm in the dialog. Permanent deletion cannot be undone.
Delete permanently… appears only for callers with the budget delete permission. Deactivate and reactivate work exactly as before and do not require that permission.
Good to know
- The audit log entry is the remaining record of a permanently deleted budget.
- Past alerts the budget triggered are kept; they no longer link to a budget.
- Nothing changes for the normal flow: deactivating and reactivating budgets works the same as always.
Keep the change accountable
Every edit, pause, deactivation, and permanent deletion is captured in the audit trail described in Audit Agent Router activity, with who made the change and when. The business justification for the new number belongs next to that record, the same discipline as at creation: a ceiling whose reasoning is recoverable a quarter later is a control; one whose reasoning is lost is a leftover.
Where to go next