# Budgets

Set spending budgets for your cloud accounts and track your actual spend against them in real time. Noros monitors your budgets and alerts you when spending approaches or exceeds your defined thresholds — all manageable through the chat.

### Budget Types

#### Year-to-Date (YTD)

Track your cumulative spend from January 1st through today against your annual budget. Noros shows your current spend as a percentage of the total budget and highlights whether you're on pace.

**Try asking:**

* "What's my YTD budget status?"
* "Am I on track for my annual cloud budget?"
* "How much of my yearly budget have I used?"

#### Month-to-Date (MTD)

Track your spend from the first of the month through today against your monthly budget. Useful for catching overspend early in the billing cycle.

**Try asking:**

* "How much have we spent this month compared to our budget?"
* "Are we over or under budget this month?"
* "What's our monthly budget status?"

#### Custom

Track spend within a custom date range — a quarter, a project timeline, or any period you define — against a specific budget target.

**Try asking:**

* "What's our budget status for Q2?"
* "How are we tracking against our custom budget?"
* "Show me our budget progress"

### Setting Budgets

You can set and update your budgets by asking Noros:

* "Set my monthly budget to $50,000"
* "I want to set a yearly budget of $500,000"
* "Create a custom budget of $100,000 from April 1 to June 30"

### Budget Tracking

For each budget, Noros reports:

* **Spend vs. budget** — Your actual spend as a percentage of the defined budget
* **Pacing** — Whether your spend rate is ahead of, behind, or on pace relative to time elapsed in the budget period
* **Amortized costs** — Budget tracking uses amortized costs by default, which spreads commitment purchases over their term for more accurate monthly patterns

### Budget Alerts

Noros monitors your budgets and can notify you when thresholds are reached:

* **Warning** — Spending has reached 80% of your YTD budget
* **Critical** — Spending has reached or exceeded 100% of the budget

Configure budget alert notifications from your monitoring settings, or by asking Noros to update your notification preferences.

[Learn more about notifications →](/account-management/monitoring-and-notifications.md)

### Example Conversations

**Quick status check:**

> "Are we on budget?"
>
> Noros shows your YTD and MTD budget status with spend amounts, percentages, and pacing indicators.

**Investigation:**

> "We're over budget this month — why?"
>
> Noros checks your budget status, identifies that you're over, and then breaks down spending by service to show what's driving the overage.


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