Are we tracking to budget?

MetricActual spend against budgeted spend, cumulative and by period

Unitpercent variance to plan, and currency

Two lines: planned spend vs actual spend over time. Pull budget and accounting data. Mid-year gap is the early warning for end-of-year overrun. Track by department and aggregate. Example: Aug actual $14.2M vs plan $12.8M = $1.4M over budget by mid-year (signal to cut).

practitioner thresholds used in FP&A and project controls rather than a published survey distribution, cross-checked against the post-financing spend behaviour of VC-backed technology companies in 2025 · No Tier 1 or Tier 2 dataset publishes a distribution of budget attainment, which is why confidence is low and why the category table is empty. The plus or minus 5 percent threshold is a practitioner convention that appears consistently across FP&A guidance and project controls literature but has no large-sample distribution behind it, and the tighter 2 to 3 percent consolidated guardrail comes from the same source class. The one hard behavioural datapoint available is SVB's finding that burn rose about 50 percent in the twelve months after a raise while revenue growth rose about 75 percent, which suggests the most common budget-versus-plan failure is a plan that was never rebuilt after the round closed rather than undisciplined spending against a live plan. Treat the numbers here as control thresholds, not as benchmarks.

Category split omitted: No two independent Tier 1 or Tier 2 sources publish budget attainment split by function, company size or sector, so any category table here would be invented.

The cumulative line tracks plan almost exactly while the monthly bars swing 15 percent either side of it, which means the total is right by accident and no individual month was forecast correctly.

Year-to-date operating expense of $24.1M against a $24.3M plan, made up of months running minus 14, plus 11, minus 9, plus 16, plus 2 and minus 7 percent against their own budgets.

• Chart committed spend rather than invoiced spend only. Most apparent month-end underspend is a purchase order raised and not yet billed, and a plan tracked on invoices looks healthy right up to the quarter it catches up, usually the one with the board meeting in it.
• Rebuild the budget within 30 days of any financing event. SVB's data has burn rising about 50 percent in the year after a raise, so a plan built before close describes a company that no longer exists and variance against it stops being informative by the second month.
• Set variance thresholds by function rather than one company-wide number, tighter for high-velocity spend such as paid media and looser for events and one-off programmes, and require a named-owner explanation before close rather than after it.
• Report headcount plan against actual on the same chart as spend. Benchmarkit's operating expense ratios show payroll dominating every function, so a budget on plan with headcount below plan is not a cost saving, it is a hiring failure that will appear as a growth miss two quarters later.

1. UmbrexBudget vs Actual Cost Variance, finance analysis guide · 2026 · practitioner guidance, no survey sample Sets practitioner variance guardrails of plus or minus 3 to 5 percent against plan for individual functions and plus or minus 2 to 3 percent for consolidated operating expense absent revenue shocks, and recommends tracking 12 to 16 quarters of variance distributions by function and business unit. umbrex.com ↗
2. The Pedowitz GroupWhat variance is acceptable in marketing budgets? · 2026 · practitioner guidance, no survey sample Sets a practical threshold framework of 0 to 5 percent acceptable variance at total budget level, 5 to 10 percent requiring review and more than 10 to 15 percent requiring approval or reallocation, with tighter thresholds for high-velocity spend such as paid media. pedowitzgroup.com ↗
3. SaaStr (reporting SVB)$340 Billion in VC, But Fewer Deals Than Any Year This Decade: SVB's 2026 State of the Markets · 2026 · secondary reporting of SVB State of the Markets, 30th edition, data through 31 December 2025 Reports that companies increased burn by about 50 percent and revenue growth by about 75 percent in the twelve months after raising in 2025, meaning post-financing plans are the ones most likely to be wrong. saastr.com ↗
4. Benchmarkit2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks · 2025 · n=~1,000 private B2B SaaS companies, FY2024 data Reports private SaaS operating expense at median levels of 37 percent of revenue for sales and marketing, 34 percent for R&D and 24 percent for G&A, and notes these ratios should be evaluated by company size and funding source because both are highly correlated with the benchmark. benchmarkit.ai ↗
5. APQCPlanning and Management Accounting Key Benchmarks · 2025 · APQC Open Standards Benchmarking, planning and management accounting, cross-industry Publishes APQC benchmarks for total cost to plan, budget and forecast and for cycle time to complete the annual budget, across industries. apqc.org ↗
6. SaaS Capital2026 Spending Benchmarks for Private B2B SaaS Companies · 2026 · n=more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies, annual Q1 survey Reports median total departmental spend at 96 percent of ARR for bootstrapped private SaaS companies against 101 percent for equity-backed, which is the aggregate spend envelope any budget sits inside. saas-capital.com ↗
7. The Hackett Group2025 European Working Capital Survey · 2025 · n=1,000 largest European-headquartered nonfinancial companies, FY2024 Reports European aggregate revenue declining for a second consecutive year while total debt as a share of revenue rose, the conditions under which spend plans built on a growth assumption fail. thehackettgroup.com ↗