Budgets: Admin guide (Beta)

This product is currently in beta.

Budgets give you real-time visibility into your company’s budgeted vs. actual spend, so you and your budget owners can make informed decisions without digging through spreadsheets. 

This guide is for admins who set up and manage budgets. 

Key capabilities:

1. Track spend against your company’s budget in real-time
2. Spend automatically maps to the right budget
3. Assign budget owners to have visibility over their team’s budget 
4. Budget aware approvals: budget owners can be added as dynamic approvers to spend approval workflows and see the impact on the budget when approving
5. Proactively identify unplanned spend: automatically identify unplanned spend and track it for reporting and re-forecasting purposes (coming soon) 

Before you begin

• Owner, Admin, Finance Admin, and Finance Manager roles can create or edit budgets. 
  • Users with custom roles that include the “budget admin” permission can as well
• Any user can be assigned as a budget owner to monitor a budget 
• Your spend accounting data should be set up in Airwallex using NetSuite, Xero, Quickbooks, Microsoft Business Central, Exact Online, or customer accounting. Budgets rely on your accounting data values for automatic tagging.

Create a budget

For a visual walkthrough, watch our Budgets setup guide.

Follow these steps in Airwallex.

Step 1: Access Budgets

Go to Spend > Budgets. Click “Get started.”

Step 2: Define your budget structure

1. Enter a Budget name (for example, FY2026).
2. Set the Budget period, Budget currency and Intervals (Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly).
   • Spend made in other currency’s is converted to the budget’s currency when viewing spend on each object. This is for visualization purposes only, there is no forced conversion with the underlying transaction.
3. Create your budget hierarchy
   • Add the levels that define how your budget is organised (e.g. Department, Expense Category, Vendor, Entity)
     • You can choose from any accounting data field in Airwallex 
   • Select a field for each level. The top level is the broadest and bottom is most granular
4. [Optional] add a custom field to group values. 
   • Custom fields allow admin users to create higher level groups for their accounting data.
   • Examples of how they can be used:
     • Track a field that doesn't exist in your accounting data (e.g. Division to group multiple departments like Product, Design, and Engineering under R&D)
     • Use to support Xero and Quickbooks multi-entity budgets 
       • Accounting values for Xero, Quickbooks, Exact Online, and MSBC are entity-specific even if they have the exact same name ("Marketing – Entity A/B/C"), so a custom field at the top of the hierarchy can be used to roll them into one global "Marketing" budget across entities.
   • Rules for custom fields
     • They can’t be the lowest level in the hierarchy, and two custom fields can’t sit directly on top of one another
     • The same accounting data combination can't belong to two custom field values
       • The accounting data defines the budget line, and each line can only roll up into one group
   • Custom fields are used for visibility and analytics in Airwallex only and won't sync to the accounting provider.
5. Select Next.

Step 3: Upload budget

1. Download template: download the XLSX template that Airwallex generates for your budget structure.
2. Add budget data via your spreadsheet editor of choice: enter your amounts for each budget line and period in the template. 
   • Do not change the column headers
   • Tip: add a description to each budget line for more accurate spend to budget matching and unplanned-spend detection (coming soon. See more here)
3. Upload: upload your completed budget file, then select Next.

Step 4: Review budget data

1. Review the imported budget and fix any highlighted mapping errors. 
2. Address any validation errors flagged by the system: 
   • Make sure all fields in your budget exist in Airwallex

Step 5: Review and assign owners

1. Assign budget owners to budget. Owners set on a parent line are automatically applied to its child lines. 
   • For example, if your Marketing budget has 10 budget lines within it, the marketing budget owner will also be the owner of those budget lines
2. Select Create budget. Airwallex builds your budgets and confirms when creation is complete.
3. All of the current year's spend to date will automatically be tagged to the correct budget based on its accounting data.

Step 6: Add Budget Owners to Approval Workflows [Optional]

To get the most out of Airwallex Budgets, we suggest adding budget owners to your card expenses, reimbursements, bills, and purchase request approval workflows. This will allow your budget owners to understand the impact of spend on their budget when approving.

You can add budget owners to approval rules by navigating to “Spend Approvals” and add “budget owner” from the select approvers dropdown. (See more here on configuring spend approvals)

Manage an existing budget

Open the 3 dot menu next to the budget dropdown to manage it:

• Edit budget name
• Edit budget: update your budget data
  • Change amounts and add or remove budget lines here.
  • To make changes to your budget hierarchy dimensions, upload a new budget
• View budget activity: see a log of who changed what and when (created, renamed, amounts edited, owners changed).
• Download budget: export the budget in XLSX format.
• Delete budget: permanently remove the budget. This can’t be undone: all budget data is removed, spend mapped to it remains but no longer shows budget information, and any unplanned-spend classifications and notes are removed.

How budgets work

Key definitions

• Total is the budgeted amount for the time period
• Actuals is the amount of spend recognized in the time period
• Committed is the amount of open purchase orders and portions of amortized bills yet to be actualised
• Used = Actual + Committed
• Available = Total - Used

How spend is tracked against budgets

Budgets are created with accounting dimensions (e.g. accounting department, expense category, vendor). Spend is automatically tied to a budget based on the accounting data values. No manual tagging is needed.

When spend counts against the budget

• Card expenses: Appear in actual spend upon submission. Transaction date is used to determine the budget period for the card expense
• Reimbursement: Appear in actual spend upon submission. Transaction date is used to determine the budget period for the reimbursement
  • If the reimbursement is rejected, the amount is released back to the available budget and removed from actuals
• Bill: Appear in actual spend upon submission. Invoice date is used to determine the budget period for the bill.
  • If the bill is rejected, the amount is released back to the budget and subtracted from actual spend
  • For amortised bills:
    • Unrecognized portion of amortized bills are considered committed spend 
    • Recognized portion of the bill is actual spend
• Purchase orders: Appear in committed spend upon approval of purchase request

View budget utilisation while creating or approving spend

On a bill, card expense, reimbursement or purchase request, the Budget section shows which budget the spend maps to and its impact against the given budget. The impact against the budget is always converted to the budget’s reporting currency.

When creating a spend record

• You can view the impact on the budget by hovering over the budget name.
• You can also manually choose the budget when submitting card expenses and creating reimbursements, bills, or purchase requests. This will automatically fill out the associated accounting data fields

When approving spend

• You can view the impact on the budget with the budget component. Expand it to see the Total, Used, and Available budget. 
• You can change both the budget period and level of the hierarchy being viewed in this component for flexibility.
• To change the budget, select edit and then open the budget dropdown

Amortised bills

All customers that use budgets have the amortisation field included in their bill form.

Amortisations are used to ensure that prepaid expenses (those paid in advance but used over time) are recognized gradually, in the correct accounting periods, rather than all at once when the bill is paid.

• For example, a $12,000 prepayment for a 12 month subscription to Figma should have $1,000 recognized each month in the budget

Note: Amortisations will only be created in the connected accounting provider for NetSuite customers only to start. Customers using Xero, Quickbooks, MSBC, and Exact Online will need to manually create amortisations in the accounting provider for now. 

To Amortise a bill you can do the following:

• Select amortisation (only straight line amortisation is currently supported for Budgets)
• Start date, end date

How Budget amounts are allocated 

• Rather than using the total amount of the bill as used, we’ll amortise the amount (e.g. $1,000 / mo subscription)
• How it works for actuals and committed spend given a $12,000 / year subscription
  • Upon submission: Actuals ($1,000), Committed ($11,000 for the next 11 months)
  • Each subsequent month Actuals increases by $1,000 and Committed decreases by $1,000

“Other spend” catch-all budgets

Below the top budget hierarchy level, Airwallex keeps an “Other spend” line at each level so unmatched spend always has a home. There are two kinds:

• Admin-created “Other spend”: a line you add and give an amount to for miscellaneous spend. Its tooltip reads “Admin-created budget for unmatched spend.”
  • For example, you may want to budget $100K/year for miscellaneous Marketing spend that doesn’t track to a specific expense category
  • Example for a budget hierarchy that contains Department and Expense Category:
    • You can create the $100K miscellaneous Marketing budget by creating a budget line with Marketing in the department column and leaving the expense category blank. 
• System-generated “Other spend”: This is created automatically with no budgeted amount. It only appears once spend is allocated to it, and its tooltip reads “System-generated for unmatched spend.” 
  • Example for a budget hierarchy that contains Department and Expense Category with a Marketing Department Budget:
    • 3 Marketing budgets exist for the following expense categories:
      • Travel
      • Events
      • Software
    • If a bill comes in where department = Marketing and expense category = paid ads, the bill will be tagged to Marketing / Other spend. The spend still belongs to the parent marketing budget, but not any other granular Marketing budget.

[Coming soon] Adding description to a budget line for more intelligent matching

• Budget matching always happens using accounting data first. Once spend is mapped to the right accounting data, Airwallex AI then considers any Description on budget lines within that accounting data combination.
• Description is used by AI to decide whether the spend maps to a specific budget line or falls into that path’s “Other spend” bucket, regardless of whether there is one or many budget lines with the same accounting data.
• Consider a budget that includes vendor in the hierarchy:
  • You may have multiple budgets for a vendor like AWS and can create separate budget lines using the description field to track them individually
  • Example Budgets uploaded:

• When spend records (e.g. card expense, bill or purchase request) come in with AWS as the vendor, Airwallex AI will evaluate which of the 3 AWS budget lines the spend belongs to based on the spend record’s data.

Frequently asked questions

Who can create or edit budgets? 

• Users with the “Budget admin” permission. 
• This permission is included in the following default roles: Owner, Admin, Finance Admin, and Finance Manager
• The permission can also be added to custom roles

Who can be assigned as a budget owner?

• Any user can be assigned as a budget owner to monitor a budget and take part in approvals.

Can budgets overlap? 

• No, budgets can’t have overlapping date ranges. Creating one that overlaps an existing open budget will overwrite that budget’s data.

What’s the difference between a budget and a limit?

• Budgets give you real-time visibility into your company’s budgeted vs. actual spend. They don’t block spend
• Limits control and enforce spend.