Introduction
As an admin, you can create budgets for your organization to track spending and add spending limits. You can also share these budgets with your employees, so that they can track how their expenses are contributing towards the budget.
Setting up budgets
Navigate to Admin Settings > Expenses > Budgets.
Click on Add new budget to create a new budget. There are 7 options available:
Categories: This budget applies across specific categories.
For example, Yearly Travel Budget which applies across categories Airlines, Lodging and Taxi.
Cost center and categories: This budget applies across specific categories, but for a chosen cost center.
For example, Yearly Travel Budget for New York cost center which applies across categories Airlines, Lodging and Taxi.
Cost center: This budget applies across a chosen cost center.
For example, Yearly Budget for New York cost center, which counts all expenses for this cost center.
Department and categories: This budget applies across specific categories, but for a chosen department.
For example,Yearly Travel Budget for Sales department which applies across categories Airlines, Lodging and Taxi.
Department: This budget applies across a chosen department.
For example,Yearly Budget for Sales department, which counts all expenses for this department.
Project and categories: This budget applies across specific categories, but for a chosen project.
For example,Yearly Travel Budget for Project Delta 2026 which applies across categories Airlines, Lodging and Taxi.
Project: This budget applies across a chosen project.
For example,Yearly Budget for Project Delta 2026, which counts all expenses for this project.
Set the budget frequency. You have 4 options: Yearly, Monthly, Quarterly or One Time.
Set the budget amount.
Set the budget visibility. You have 3 options:
Only admins: Only admins can view the budget setup and utilization.
All contributing employees: Any employee that makes an expense that contributes towards the budget will start seeing the overall budget and available amount in their dashboard. They will not be able to see detailed expenses made by other employees, they will only see overall usage.
Specific employees: You can also manually select a list of employees who will be able to see the overall budget and available amount in their dashboard. They will not see the detailed expenses made by other employees.
Set the budget threshold and notification recipient. For example, if you select 80% and Theresa, Theresa will receive an alert email when the budget crosses 80% utilization.
Note: The notification recipient can be an employee with one of the following roles in Sage Expense Management: Admin, Finance, Project Approver, Department Approver. The recipient cannot be an employee with only Spender or Approver role.
Set a budget name to easily identify the budget.
Click on Save. This will successfully create the new budget.
View and export allocated and remaining budgets
You also need to view the spending and remaining budget for your employees. After you create a budget for your employees, their expenses will be accounted for in the respective budgets, and you can view the data of each budget from the budgets visibility section on Sage Expense Management.
Navigate to Spend Overview > Budgets from your dashboard.
You can see the list of Budgets created in your organization along with the following details:
Budget Limit: Total amount allocated for the budget
Utilization: % of the budget utilized or spent
Remaining: Available amount for the budget
Frequency: The frequency of the budget, such as monthly, yearly, etc.
Created By: The person who created the budget, the administrator(s), or the Owner.
Budget status: On track, Exceeded, Disabled.
To view the data of a specific budget, you can use the quick filters available on the page. For example, if you want to view all the yearly budgets with less than 50% utilization, you can select those values from the filters to see the respective budgets.
If you want to view the expenses accounted for for a specific budget, click on that Budget Name. You'll be redirected to the Business Expenses page, where you can view all expenses of that budget. You can export these expenses in CSV/Excel or PDF for reporting purposes.
View history: Click on this option to view the historic usage of the budget.
Export: Select the budgets you want to export and click on the Export option. This will send you a list of all selected budgets along with their current utilization to your email.
Note: Budgets are time-bound and will be reset after regular intervals based on your budget type. For example, if you create a monthly budget, it refreshes on the first of every month.