Track and manage your spend effortlessly in iCompleat

Activity budgets in iCompleat make it effortless to track and manage your activity-based spending, helping you wave goodbye to pesky spreadsheets. 

Whether it’s for keeping track of budgets in line with corporate requirements, or simply tracking and monitoring spend for certain projects or activities, iCompleat’s Acitivity Budgets tool has you covered.

An activity budget takes just seconds to set up, but can simplify your future spend forecasting, help you record the variance between your planned spend and actual spend, and identify habits that are making you miss your spending targets.

• Track spending in your dedicated Activity Budgets dashboard.
• Monitor budgets over a period of time, or choose a continuous activity-based insight.
• Get notifications when budgets are about to hit their limit.
• Share budgets with your team.
• See real-time spending data in the Budget Analysis report.

How do activity budgets work?

Activity budget criteria

To set up criteria for an activity budget, you can use analysis fields cached from your accounting software, or create custom analysis fields directly within the Activity Budgets tool. For example, you might want to create an activity budget for all invoices received that use Euro or USD as the currency, or are coded to a particular project or supplier.

You can add secondary criteria items to make your activity budget more specific. For example, an activity budget might include all transactions that are coded to a particular department and site code. This is reflected within your activity budget in real time.

Your activity budget in action

When fully approved purchase orders or invoices contain lines that meet the analysis criteria for an activity budget, the value of those lines is deducted from the activity budget – including or excluding tax, depending on your preferences.

If coding is applied to the invoice at header level, the entire value of that invoice is deducted from the relevant activity budget.

Each activity budget you have access to appears in the Activity Budgets dashboard within a tile, complete with an interactive graph with key information about the activity budget.

Any activity budgets that you create or have access to won't affect how transactions are processed in iCompleat, or influence non-activity-budget-related reports or activities in iCompleat.

Sharing your activity budgets

You have the option to keep activity budgets private in your dedicated Activity Budgets dashboard or share them with your team in iCompleat. Any activity budget that you share with other people will appear in their Activity Budgets dashboard, and they will have access to its advanced data in the Budget Analysis report if they've been granted the additional permission in their main iCompleat user profile.

An iCompleat Administrator in your team controls each user’s permission to view, edit and create activity budgets from within their user profiles, as well as their access to the Budget Analysis report. If you don’t see the Activity Budgets tile on the iCompleat homepage or have access to the report, it may be because you haven’t been granted permission.

Understanding your activity budgets

For a more detailed insight into activity budgets, you can go to the dedicated Budget Analysis report, which lets you drill down to the specific transactions behind each activity budget and see its results in more detail.

If you’ve already created a budget and want to know more, skip to Managing your activity budgets. Otherwise, keep scrolling to learn about how to create and customise your first activity budget.

Activity budgets vs. financial budgets - what's the difference?

Our newest budgeting tool, Financial Budgets, launched in January 2026, offers greater visibility and control over spend for budget holders.

While activity budgets give a useful insight into spend across activities within a business, a financial budget enables flexible tracking of multiple nominal values against a tracking code over a period up to a year.

While activity budgets can issue email alerts if budgets are exceeded, financial budgets sit at the heart of your team's activity in iCompleat. Purchasers can see if an order they're about to place in iCompleat will cause overspend. Approvers get to see whether a transaction they're about to approve will exceed a budget.

An order in iCompleat before being submitted for approval, with line-level financial budget detail:

Get access to activity budgets

A Compleat administrator must grant you permission in your iCompleat user profile

To gain access to budgets other users have created, they must grant you access in the budget settings (see Create an activity budget below).

Create an activity budget

1. On the iCompleat homepage, click Activity Budgets.
2. In the top-right, click New budget.

Step 1: Basic Details

You need to complete the fields in the Basic Details section before configuring your activity budget criteria. You can adjust the settings in this tab at any time after you save your activity budget.

In Basic Details you can input the following information:

When you’re happy with your activity budget’s basic details, click Save in the bottom-right.

Step 2: Activity Budget Tracking

When you’ve completed and saved your activity budget's basic details, you can access the Budget Tracking options. This is how choose the analysis items that affect your activity budget.

Primary analysis item

You need to choose at least one primary analysis item for your activity budget to track. Line items or invoices that are coded to this primary analysis item and are fully approved will be counted against the activity budget.

Select the analysis item from the left-hand drop-down, and the code(s) from the other.

Secondary analysis item(s) (optional)

If you’d like iCompleat to track a primary analysis item and secondary analysis item(s), select codes from the Optional secondary analysis item(s) drop-down.

You can add multiple secondary analysis items to make your activity budget criteria as detailed as you need it to be.

Transactions that contain both your primary analysis item and all of the secondary analysis items will be counted against the activity. If you add multiple secondary analysis items to an activity budget and a transaction only contains the primary analysis item and just one secondary analysis item, it won’t be counted against the activity budget.

When you’re happy with your activity budget criteria, click Save in the bottom-right.

Step 3: Alerts

The Alerts tab is where you can configure the email alerts that iCompleat will send you if your activity budget is either approaching its total or has exceeded it.

You can choose who will receive the alerts as well as the frequency of them. For email alerts that notify you when an activity budget is approaching its total, you have the additional option to choose how close to your activity budget total you’ll start receiving alerts.

Alerts are switched off by default.

When you’re happy with your alerts settings, click Save in the bottom-right corner.

What now?

You just created your first activity budget! 🙌

Don’t stop there – add more activity budgets to get further insights into the spending across your company. There’s no limit to how many activity budgets you can create.

Now that you’ve created your activity budget, you’re probably desperate to see it in action. Your activity budget is now in your Activity Budgets dashboard, which you can access from the iCompleat homepage.

Keep scrolling to get some top tips on analysing and understanding your activity budget.

Managing your activity budgets

All activity budgets that you have created or have access to can be found in your Activity Budgets dashboard, which is accessible from the iCompleat homepage.

Each activity budget sits in its own tile containing its basic details and a graph, providing all of the information you need to understand the status of your activity budget at a glance.

The red line on the graph indicates your activity budget total. The activity budget graph is split into these categories, which you can toggle on and off depending on the results you’d like to see:

• Soft commit - Unapproved POs (Saved POs not included)
• Hard commit - Approved POs (no receipt or invoice yet) and/or with a future delivery date) where receipting is not being used).
• Expensed - Approved invoices (includes both posted invoices and posting failures).
• Accrual - Unapproved invoices, receipted POs, and POs with a delivery date in the past (where receipting is not being used).

You can also see these budget details:

• Budget time period (if any)
• Budget spending so far
• Available budget balance
• Who created the budget
• When the budget was last refreshed to reflect any recent transactions.

Interact with your activity budget

Activity budget graphs are interactive, meaning you can switch the various components on and off to narrow down the graph results, as well as jump to the Budget Analysis report straight from the graph and see the advanced data behind your budget.

To switch a component of the graph on or off, click on one of the categories below the graph (Hard Commit, Soft Commit, Expensed, Accrual).

To jump to the Budget Analysis report and see the individual transactions making up one of those categories, click the relevant bar in the graph.

Edit, refresh or delete your activity budget

The burger menu in the top-right of each activity budget lets you edit, delete, refresh, or close the activity budget.

Clicking Edit lets you make changes to any of an activity budget's basic details, budget tracking selections and alert settings.

Clicking Delete triggers a popup asking you if you're sure you'd like to delete your activity budget.

Clicking Refresh updates the activity budget to include any recent transactions that might have been counted against the activity budget since the last automatic cache.

Close or re-open an activity budget

If you'd like to close an activity budget so that it freezes and is no longer visible in your Activity budgets dashboard, click the dots in the top-right of an activity budget, and click Close.

You can view closed budgets by clicking the Closed budgets toggle in the top-left of your Activity Budgets dashboard.

To re-open a closed activity budget, simply view your closed activity budgets, click the dots in the top-right of a closed activity budget, and click Re-open. The activity budget will appear in your Activity budgets dashboard and will start collecting data again.

 Still got questions? Comment below and let us know how we can improve this guide.