Planned against actual spending, line by line, for the people who need to see where the money goes.
A budget has two jobs, and they pull in different directions. One is doing the sums, which belongs in a spreadsheet. The other is showing a committee, a funder or a department head where the money stands, and a page they can read on a phone does that better than a grid of cells. This page is about the second job, with a festival treasurer's update to adapt.
Who it's for
Treasurers, event organizers, project leads and department managers: whoever holds the purse and owes other people a regular look inside it. Send it before the meeting where money gets discussed, so the meeting starts from the same numbers.
Keep the spreadsheet. It's where you add invoices, try a what-if and keep the history. The page is a copy for reading, made again whenever the numbers move.
What a good one contains
- What's left, first. The sample opens on $3,210 left of $24,000. Most readers came for that number.
- One row per line, planned beside spent. Nine lines, each with a bar drawn on the same dollar scale, so a $5,200 stage looks bigger than $1,500 of printing.
- A reason on every line that's over. Three lines are over, by $1,110 between them. Each says why: a new generator rule, 140 extra lanterns, a fee the city raised.
- A definition of "spent". Here it means paid, or owed under a signed contract, with a deposit counted as the deposit alone. Without that line, nobody can tell whether a half-paid booking is in the total.
- The bills still to come. Money left isn't money free. The sample sets $3,320 of bills against the $3,210 left and says plainly that it's $110 short.
- Money in, if it moved. Income gets its own small table: planned beside now expected, with the cause of each change.
- Where you expect to finish, and what you need. One line of arithmetic, then the decision the committee has to make on Tuesday.
The page and the spreadsheet
Paste the lines from your spreadsheet into the Claude conversation instead of retyping them. Then check the page's totals against the spreadsheet's before you send. A budget page whose total is $40 out loses the room, and nobody hears the rest.
Send the same link every time. When the numbers change, change them in the conversation where you made the page and replace it. Put the date of the update at the top, so a reader who opens it twice can tell which version they have.
Write the reasons yourself. Only you know that the hire firm changed its rules or that the workshops filled faster than planned, and those sentences are what a funder remembers.
How to send it
With a password. It shows what each supplier is charging, and those quotes weren't given to the whole town. Tell the committee and the funders the password once, with the first update.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
