Budget and targets

The Budget card at the top of Home shows what you’ve committed to creators each month against the budget you set. It covers three months back, this month and three months ahead, so you can see at a glance whether next month is under-booked or this month is already over.

The Budget card on Home. Each bar is published (solid coral), booked (light coral) and usage rights (blue), inside a light track for the month's target.

This month, this month so far, and the next three months, against your targets.
Edit targets (or Set targets) sets the budget for each month.

What each bar shows

Each month has one stacked bar inside a light track. The track is your target for that month.

Part of the bar	Colour	What counts
Published	Solid coral	The rate of each deal at Published with its publish date in that month
Booked, not yet published	Light coral	The rate of each deal at Finalize contract or Content expected with its publish date in that month
Usage rights	Blue	The part of each ad usage license’s cost that falls in that month
Target	Light track behind the bar	Your target for the month, if you’ve set one

A bar that fills its track has hit the target, and a bar that rises above it is over. This month’s label is in bold. The legend only lists Usage rights and Target once you have some.

Hover over a month to see the breakdown: how many deals are published and booked, the committed total, the target, and how much is Left to book or Over target. In past months, booked deals are labelled Overdue, not published, because their publish date has passed and the content still isn’t out.

What counts toward the budget

Committed is what Creator Jam measures against your target:

committed = published + booked + usage rights

A few rules decide where a deal lands:

A deal counts in the month of its publish date. Move a deal’s Publish Date and it moves to that month’s bar. A deal with no publish date isn’t on the chart.
Negotiating deals are shown but not counted. Deals at Reach out, Follow up or Negotiating appear in the tooltip as “still negotiating, not counted”, because the rate may change or the deal may fall through.
Dead deals count nowhere.
Usage rights are spread over the license’s term. See below.

The numbers above the chart

October committed (named for the current month): this month’s committed total. With a target set, a progress bar shows how much is left or how far over you are. Without one, it says No target set.
Published so far: this month’s published spend, the number of deals published, and how much is booked to go.
Next 3 months committed: the committed total for the next three months, compared with their combined target. If only some of those months have a target, it says how many do instead of comparing a partial target with the full total.

Set or change monthly targets

Targets are shared by everyone on your team.

On Home, click Set targets on the Budget card. Once any month has a target, the button reads Edit targets.
Enter a dollar amount for each month you want to budget. The list runs from three months back to eight months ahead, and shows what’s already committed next to each month.
To use the same figure everywhere, type it into Same target for every month and click Apply. Then adjust any month that’s different.
Click Save targets.

Amounts can be typed as 80000 or $80,000. A target can be any amount from $0 up.

To clear a month’s target, empty its box and click Save targets. That month then has no target, and its bar has no track behind it.

How usage rights are spread across months

When you pay a creator to run their content as ads, the license cost is spread evenly over its term rather than landing all at once:

Each month of the license carries an equal share. A 3-month, $3,000 license from Sam Builds Stuff starting January 1 adds $1,000 to each of January, February and March.
A license month that crosses a calendar month is split by day. A 1-month, $1,000 license starting January 15 adds about $548 to January and $452 to February.
A perpetual license counts in full on its start date, since there’s no term to spread it over.

License costs count toward the budget, because they’re money you’ve committed to creators. They’re kept off the ROI page, for reasons explained in Ad usage licenses.

Let Claude manage targets

If you’ve connected Claude or another AI assistant, it can read your monthly budget and set or clear targets for you. See Claude and AI assistants.