Advertising Budgets

Turn ad spend and ROAS into editable levers you can plan and simulate month by month.

2 min read

By default, advertising is projected like any other cost: last month's spend, carried forward. That is the least useful default anywhere in the forecast, because advertising is the line you change on purpose. This extension makes it a lever instead.

What you set

Monthly ad budget — what you intend to spend, per month, editable into the future.
Expected ROAS — the return you get on it.

Revenue attributable to advertising is then derived from the two, rather than sitting inside a single historical revenue total where a budget change is invisible.

Why it changes the answer

Raising ad spend does not just add a cost. It adds revenue, and with the revenue comes cost of goods, shipping and payment fees — all of which land before the revenue is collected. That timing gap is the reason profitable scaling still runs businesses out of cash. Modelling budget and return together shows the gap; modelling spend alone does not.

Using it with the simulator

Because budget and ROAS are future-editable, the simulator can test them directly: double the budget in Q4 and read the cash line, not the revenue line. The question worth asking is not whether the spend is profitable but whether you can fund the weeks between paying for it and being paid.

The Advanced Advertising extension splits budget by channel, so a blended ROAS does not hide one channel subsidising another.

Planning spend against what the business can actually fund is ad budget planning.