One version-controlled model for planned and actual spend, kept in sync with your reporting, your agencies and your finance team.
The challenge
When it comes to media plans, Excel is what we're all used to, it's comfortable for all teams, and it's easy to customise, but it's not designed for version control or crucial validation, and it's too easy for human error to creep in.
Budgets move between planners, approvers and agencies, and every round trip is a new file, a new tab, or a new set of tracked changes. Knowing which version is current, and what changed since the last one, ends up resting on memory rather than a record.
PO numbers are usually tracked separately from budget, so there's no reliable link between what was planned, what was raised, and what's actually been spent. Catching an overspend against a PO, or a PO that's changed since it was raised, means checking by hand.
Weekly budget updates, agency schematics and finance summaries all draw on the same planning data, but each one is assembled separately, by hand, from exports and copy-paste. By the time a report is finished, the plan underneath it has usually already moved on.
The solution
Everything below comes as standard, set up around your planning structure and kept running.
Budget Manager replaces spreadsheet planning with structured data, modelled to your categories, campaigns and finance hierarchy, with a full audit trail of every change.
Taxonomy Manager validates naming conventions and PO assignment at the point of activation, so actual spend can always be traced back to the right planned budget.
Reporting is linked directly to your planning data, so publishing a change updates every dashboard and view automatically, no manual rebuilds required.
Planning periods align to your financial year, quarters and any custom reporting periods your teams already work to.
Connect your structured media plan data to the tools your finance team uses with our Reporring API. All teams in sync, across all tools.
What changes
Planned budgets and pacing, mapped to how you allocate your budgets, in one structured, version-controlled, auditable workflow.
The timeline
Here's what getting started actually looks like.
Day 1
We walk through how your team plans and reports on budget today, which spreadsheets and processes are involved, and where the manual effort sits.
Week 1
We map your current planning structure, categories and finance hierarchy into a data model, so the new setup mirrors how your teams already work.
Week 2-3
Budget Manager is configured and your current plan migrated across, with roles, permissions and version history in place from day one.
Ongoing
We connect actual spend, extend reporting to agencies and finance, and add automation such as pacing alerts and PO validation as your process needs it.
The cost
Every tier includes
Planner Core
Structured, version-controlled budget planning, replacing your spreadsheet process like-for-like.
Modules
Budget Manager
Reporting & VisualisationFeatures
Includes
Support
Planner Custom
A deeper level of customisation, connecting planning, actuals and finance into one process.
Modules
Budget Manager
Taxonomy ManagerReporting & VisualisationAdditional Features
Support
FAQs
Yes. We model the planning data around your existing structure, whether that's by category, channel, campaign or media owner, so teams keep working the way they already do, just on a shared, structured foundation instead of separate files.
PO numbers become a property of the planning data itself, captured at whatever level your process requires. Once campaigns are tagged consistently through Taxonomy Manager, actual spend can be linked back to the correct PO automatically.
In most cases, yes. Once planning data is structured and actual spend is flowing in, recurring reports such as weekly budget updates or agency schematics can move from a manual build to an always-on dashboard.
Yes, though importing historic data is typically a manual exercise on our side. It's usually worth doing, since a clean historic record of planned and actual spend is a valuable input for future planning and modelling.
We'll look at how your team plans and reports on budget today, then build a structured model that keeps planning, actuals and finance reporting in sync, without the manual rebuild every week.
