Budgets and unit economics

Monthly targets with a labelled projection method, and spend attributed to the business dimension that matters to you.

Budgets #

An administrator sets monthly targets under Integrations, either for the whole estate or per subscription.

Flux then reports, for each target:

Column Meaning
Budget The target you set
MTD actual Finalized month-to-date spend
Burn Actual as a percentage of budget
Projected Where the month is heading, with its percentage
Status On track, at risk, or over

Status thresholds are deliberately simple: projected above 100% is over, above 90% is at risk, otherwise on track.

The projection method, stated #

The projection is a linear run-rate over finalized days: month-to-date actual extrapolated by average daily spend across the remaining calendar days.

Flux labels this on the report rather than presenting a bare number. It is a transparent method with obvious limitations — it will over-project a month that began with a one-off migration, and under-project one with a launch coming.

[!NOTE] Why not something cleverer? A sophisticated projection that nobody can explain is worse than a simple one everybody can. For seasonally-aware projection with confidence bounds, use the forecast; budgets deliberately use the method a finance partner can reproduce on paper.

Unit economics #

Cloud spend in dollars is hard to act on. Cost per unit of the thing your business actually makes is not.

An administrator sets a business-dimension tag key and a display label — for example tag key brand labelled “Brand”, or plant, product, customer, environment.

Flux then reports spend per dimension value:

Column Meaning
Dimension value The tag value, e.g. a brand name
Resources How many resources carry it
Monthly cost Actual month-to-date spend
% of spend Share of the estate

Unattributed spend — resources without the tag — is reported explicitly, with an attributed percentage, exactly as allocation does.

Start with one dimension The temptation is to model everything at once. One well-tagged dimension that leadership already thinks in is worth more than four half-tagged ones.

Executive summary #

Both feed the executive summary: month-to-date spend with its prior-period delta, budget posture, active anomalies, the savings pipeline with measured realization, allocation coverage, and top services.

It is print-friendly, so it can go into a monthly pack directly — and every figure on it comes from the same governed snapshot as the rest of the product.