Change a tracker's budget by month or quarter
You change tracker budgets on the Budget Tracker page in Budget Pacer. Click a budget cell, type the new amount, then click Save in the bar at the bottom. The page is titled Budgets and shows one row per tracker.
- In the left sidebar, open Budget Pacer and click Budget Tracker.
- Click the budget cell you want to change and type the new amount.
- Press Enter to keep the change, Tab to move to the next cell, or Esc to cancel the edit.
- A bar at the bottom shows how many unsaved changes you have, for example "3 unsaved changes". Click Save to store them, or Discard to drop them.
Budgets here are the plan Budget Pacer paces against. Saving never changes a budget in Google Ads or Microsoft Ads.
Do my budget edits save on their own?
No. Cell edits wait in the bar at the bottom until you click Save. If you leave the page or reload before you save, those edits are lost. Renaming a tracker is different, because a new name saves as soon as you press Enter.
The line under the Budget Tracker title says Auto-saves to draft before you save anything in this visit. That line does not save your cell edits. While edits wait it says, for example, 3 unsaved, and after you click Save it says Auto-saved just now.
Simple and Advanced views of Budget Tracker
Simple is the default. It shows a quarterly grid, Q1 to Q4 plus a total, for each tracker. When you type a quarter amount, Budget Pacer splits it evenly across that quarter's three months. Any amount that does not divide evenly goes to the first month of the quarter.
Advanced adds a choice of Annual, Quarterly or Monthly matrix. Typing a yearly amount in the Annual matrix splits it across all 12 months. In the Monthly matrix, past months are locked and shown dimmed. The current month, marked as the live month, and every future month stay editable. Use All or Q1 to Q4 to focus on one quarter, and Comfy or Compact to change row height. Budget Pacer remembers whether you last used Simple or Advanced.
Spread a tracker's budget evenly
Hover over a tracker's row on the Budget Tracker page and click Distribute evenly. Budget Pacer takes the row's yearly total and splits it evenly across the 12 months. Click Reset pending edits to undo unsaved changes on that row. Then click Save as usual.
In Advanced, the panel beside the chart has two more shortcuts under Auto-balance. Distribute remaining evenly gives each tracker with no budget yet an even slice of the year's plan. Copy Apr → future months copies each tracker's April amount into every month after the live month. It is available from May onward. Both stage changes for you to review and save.
Can I plan next year's budget?
No. The year menu at the top of the page only lets you pick the current year, and other years are greyed out. Budget Tracker plans one year at a time.
Rename a tracker
On the Budget Tracker page, hover over the tracker name, click the pencil (Rename), type the new name, and press Enter. Press Esc to cancel. Click the name itself to open the tracker's own page and its campaigns.
Delete a tracker from Budget Tracker
Hover over the row, click More budget tracker actions, then Delete budget tracker, then Confirm. Click Cancel to keep it. The tracker's campaigns become unassigned, and their data is kept.
What the Advanced numbers mean
Advanced also shows four cards for the plan year. Annual budget is the total of every tracker's months. YTD spend is spend so far this year, with the share of the yearly plan it uses. Forecast year-end estimates where spend will land by year end, marked On track, Under plan or Overrun risk. Avg monthly burn is average spend per month so far. A chart below compares planned and actual spend by month, and Rows with no budget counts trackers that have nothing assigned for the year.
Take a budget from Google Ads or Microsoft Ads
A tracker can read its monthly budget from the insertion order on its ad account. Click Use budget from Google Ads or Microsoft Ads in the row, then Pull account budgets at the top of the page. Those cells are greyed out, and hovering shows "Comes from the ad platform. Choose Override to edit."
- Click Override on the row to type your own amounts. Saved edits on that row are kept as overrides.
- Click Use platform value to put the overridden months back to the ad account's amount.
- Click Switch to manual to stop reading the budget from the ad account.
The budget from your ad account page has the full steps.
See who edited a budget
Click History on a row, or Change history at the top of the page, to see each budget change with who made it and the old and new value. History starts from when it was released, so earlier edits are not listed.
Download your budgets
Click Export CSV to download every tracker's budget by month for the plan year, with its engine and a total per tracker. The file holds saved amounts only, so click Save first if you have unsaved changes.