Budget status & pace

Budget status answers the question a budget exists for: are we on track, or heading over? It joins each budget definition with live spend and a forward projection.

Note

Budget status is a paid feature. On the Free plan it’s locked behind an upgrade prompt. See Plans & billing.

What status shows

For every budget, CloudQuell reports:

• Actual — spend so far in the current period.
• Forecast — where the period is projected to land at the current pace. The projection is a simple run rate: the period’s daily average so far, extended across the full period.
• Actual % and forecast % — actual and forecast expressed against the target.
• Variance — how far the forecast sits above or below the target.
• Thresholds — the percentages you configured; each crossing is recorded in the alert firing history.

Pace is the key idea: even when actual is comfortably under target, a fast burn early in the period can put the forecast over. Status surfaces that before the period closes, while you can still act.

Early in a period a run rate isn’t meaningful yet, so for roughly the first week (or until about 10% of the period has elapsed) the dashboard holds the forecast back and shows the budget as warming up instead of judging it.

Status states

Each budget is assigned a derived status:

• On track — actual and forecast are within target.
• Warning — a threshold has been crossed, or the forecast is projected to pass the highest threshold.
• Over — actual spend has reached the highest threshold. A forecast over target (with actual still under) stays at Warning, not Over.

These raw states (on_track / warning / over) are what the API and MCP server return. The dashboard presents them with forecast confidence folded in — Over budget, At risk (warning, or pacing over 100%), Warming up (too early to judge), and On track — and ranks off-plan budgets by the dollars at risk rather than by percentage.

Checking status with an agent

Through the CloudQuell MCP server you can ask for status in plain language:

“Which budgets are over or forecast to go over this period?”

The agent returns each budget joined with its actual, forecast, and derived status, and can drill into a single budget’s definition, thresholds, and scope on request.

Alert on breach

Status is a snapshot you pull; alerts push it to you. Threshold crossings appear in the unified alert firing history alongside cost-rule firings, and are delivered to the budget’s notification channels. Two things can cross a threshold:

• Actual spend passing a threshold fires that threshold — real money already spent trips every tier it passes.
• Forecast projected over budget fires only your highest threshold, and only once the forecast is reliable (past the warming-up window). This keeps alerts in step with the status the dashboard shows — an early-period run rate won’t page you with a premature “100%.”

Each threshold fires once per period per budget, so a crossing won’t re-alert every day. Give your budgets channels so you hear about a breach instead of having to check. See Alerts overview.

Managing a budget

You can edit a budget’s target, period, scope, or thresholds at any time — plus duplicate it, turn it on or off, or delete it — from the dashboard. Edits apply immediately to the next status calculation. See Managing budgets.