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See budget exhaustion coming before it blocks a team

Enterprise Tier

A hard-enforced budget that runs out mid-sprint looks like an outage to the team it blocks, and a soft-enforced one that quietly overruns defeats its purpose. Both failures are avoidable when budget burn is read on a cadence: the detail view shows how much of a ceiling is gone, how many days remain in the period, and which members are driving the spend, which is enough to intervene at 80% instead of explaining at 100%.

This guide reads the budget detail view produced by Keep each team's spend inside an agreed ceiling. The two layouts described here correspond to the Whole team and Each teammate scopes chosen at creation; the single-user scope reads as a one-row case of the per-member view.

Persona: Platform operator working in the Admin Dashboard, reviewing spend on a regular cadence with the finance and business owners who set the ceilings.

Estimated time: A few minutes per budget, repeated each reporting cycle.

Outcomes​

By the end of this guide:

  • A budget's current spend, remaining headroom, and time left in the period can be read from its detail view.
  • The pooled whole-team layout and the per-member each-teammate layout are each understood, along with the member status indicators.
  • Billed spend is distinguished from passthrough usage, and the reason passthrough is excluded from the ceiling is understood.

Prerequisites​

Open the budget detail​

Each budget opens into a detail view split into two parts: a configuration rail on the left and a spend overview on the right.

The left rail is the same for every budget regardless of scope:

  • Scope is shown as a pill at the top: Team total for a pooled whole-team budget, Team — per user for a per-member each-teammate budget.
  • Budget name is the descriptive label set at creation.
  • Spend limit is the ceiling and its cadence: monthly for a pooled budget, each member, monthly for a per-member budget.
  • Status is an Active toggle, and Audit records when the budget was created. Changing any of these is covered in Raise a spend ceiling without interrupting delivery.

The right side is the spend overview, and its shape follows the scope.

Billed spend and passthrough usage​

Both layouts separate two kinds of usage, and the distinction governs what the meter measures.

  • Billed spend is centrally managed consumption: requests Agent Router priced and counted. This is the only figure measured against the ceiling.
  • Passthrough usage is consumption on pass-through credentials, where the spend is settled with the provider directly rather than billed by Agent Router. It is shown as an approximate dollar value (marked with ≈) for visibility, but it is not counted toward the budget.

A budget therefore meters billed spend only. The passthrough total beside it is context, not part of the ceiling: a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) workload can show a large passthrough figure while contributing nothing to the budget, because that spend is attributed to the provider account rather than to usage records. The treatment of BYOK spend is covered in Use your own provider credentials.

Read a whole-team budget​

A whole-team budget pools one ceiling across every member, so its overview leads with a single meter.

  • The headline reads the billed spend against the ceiling for the period, for example $260.75 of $5,000.00 · monthly, with a progress bar toward the 100% mark.
  • Used is that spend as a percentage of the ceiling, Remaining is the headroom left, and Days left is the number of days before the period resets at the start of the next calendar month.
  • Top contributors ranks the members by their share of the team's spend this period. Each row shows the member's billed amount, their percentage of the team total, and their passthrough usage alongside.

The pooled meter answers the question a cost-centre owner asks first: how much of the team's allocation is gone and how much time is left in the period. The pairing of Used and Days left is the early-warning read: 80% used with 20 days left is a conversation to have this week, not at the reset. The contributor ranking answers the follow-up: which members account for the spend. Because the cap is pooled, an individual's heavy month is absorbed by the team total rather than blocked on its own, so the ranking is for attribution rather than enforcement.

Read a per-member budget​

An each-teammate budget applies the same ceiling to every member individually, so its overview leads with the health of the membership rather than a single meter.

  • The headline counts how many members are within their limits, for example 7 of 7 members within limits, with a breakdown into over (red), near (amber), and healthy (green).
  • Total billed is the summed billed spend across all members, Total allotted is the per-member cap multiplied by the member count, and Per-member cap is the ceiling each member carries.
  • The Members list shows one row per member, each with that member's billed spend against their own cap and the percentage consumed, plus their passthrough usage. The list can be filtered with Search members and ordered with the Spend sort.

The per-member layout is read for exceptions. The near (amber) rows are the early warning this guide exists for: members approaching their cap who can still be contacted before enforcement bites. The over rows need attention now; the healthy majority needs none. Because each member carries the same cap independently, one member exhausting their allowance has no effect on the others.

What to do next​

Where to go next

Raise a spend ceiling without interrupting delivery

Act on the early warning: adjust the ceiling before it blocks the team.

Bill AI spend back to the teams that incur it

Turn the spend read here into statements for chargeback and showback.