Track budgets in Pleo with Budgets and Sub-accounts

Track and control spend in Pleo using Budgets and Sub-accounts to gain real-time visibility and prevent overspending.

Choose between Budgets and Sub-accounts

Review the differences below to determine which tool fits your tracking or spending control needs.

• Budgets (soft budgets) track spend against a target amount using tags. Budgets improve visibility and reporting, but they don’t block spending when you reach 100%
• Sub-accounts (hard budgets) ring-fence money by moving funds into a separate balance and assigning cards/people to spend from it. If a sub-account runs out of funds, cards linked to it will decline, even if there’s still money in your Main Account

Compare feature capabilities

Use this breakdown to view plan availability, roles, and functional limits at a glance.

Budgets

• Available on Advanced and Beyond plans
• Only Admins and Extended Bookkeepers can create and update budgets
• You can add any employee as a Budget Reviewer (regardless of their Pleo role)
• To use if you want to:
  • Track spend for projects, departments, or events using tags
  • See spend vs remaining in real time (including pending + settled expenses)
  • Keep flexibility: budgets are a tracking layer and don’t affect spending ability

Sub-accounts

• Available on Essential, Advanced, and Beyond plans (limits vary by plan)
• Only Admins and Bookkeepers can create sub-accounts
• To use if you want to:
  • Allocate money into named “pots” (for example, “Marketing”, “Project A”, “Vendors”) and restrict which cards can spend from which pot
  • Stop spend when a specific pot runs out (because declines happen based on the assigned account’s balance)

Manage Budgets (soft budgets)

Budgets are based on tags. Card and out-of-pocket expenses with the budget’s tag(s), within the budget period, are counted in the budget. Invoices Paid through Pleo can also count towards a budget. Invoices that are only Marked as paid (paid outside Pleo) are not included.

Read the full guide to create and manage Budgets

Budget limitations (important)

• You can only create budgets against tags (not teams or categories)
• If you use Multi-Entity, you can’t consolidate spend across entities into a single budget. You’ll need a separate budget per entity
• Budgets aren’t reserved money: the budget doesn’t “hold” funds. It’s a visual representation of tagged spend
• Budgets aren’t assigned to specific employees: anyone can allocate spend to the budget by applying the tag
• Budgets and employee spending limitsare separate:
  • Budgets help you track spend against tags
  • Limits and/or Sub-accounts determine whether someone can spend

Manage Sub-accounts (hard budgets)

Sub-accounts let you ring-fence parts of your balance into separate, named buckets. Your money still lives in one Pleo account, but you can split it across one Main Account and zero or more sub-accounts.

As an admin, you can:

• Move money between the Main Account and sub-accounts
• Assign cards to an account (Main or a specific sub-account)

Read the full guide to set up and manage Sub-accounts

Cards and sub-accounts limitations (important)

• Each card can be assigned to one account at a time (Main or one sub-account)
• When you reassign a card, spend immediately follows the newly assigned account
• All cards of a single user (physical + virtual) can only be assigned to a single sub-account
• Temporary cards can’t be added to sub-accounts today

Related features that work well with Budgets and Sub-accounts

• Tags: consistent tagging makes budget tracking reliable
• Expense splitting: split one expense across multiple tags so it counts towards multiple budgets
• Reviewer workflows: pending/review status impacts what appears in budgets, so clear review routines help keep tracking accurate
• Cash Management: where you create sub-accounts, assign cards, move money, and set transfer rules
• Vendor cards: useful for isolating vendor spend into a dedicated sub-account.