What is a per-FTE budget?
A per-FTE budget is the amount of the organization's wallet that one Digital FTE may consume in a cycle. The manager sets it in the role's Setup tab; the FTE plans its work within it; and the morning brief shows spend against it every day. It is one of the four spend controls on ftes.ai, alongside the wallet itself, mission budgets, and the hard stop.
It is a bound rather than a target. A role that finishes its work under budget stops; it does not look for ways to spend the remainder, and a budget left unused is a sign the block can be sized down, not a failure.
How does it work with the wallet and missions?
The wallet is the organization's whole block; the per-FTE budget is a slice of it reserved as the maximum for one role; a mission budget is a slice of the role's budget reserved for one bounded push, such as a month-end close or a launch. Each level bounds the one below it, and none can exceed the one above.
External spend that a role controls, such as a Performance Ads FTE's ad budget on the ad platform, is a separate cap billed by that platform. The FTE's own token budget pays for its analysis and drafting; the ad cap pays for the ads; the brief shows both, and neither can borrow from the other.
- Wallet: the whole block, one per organization
- Per-FTE budget: the maximum for one role in a cycle
- Mission budget: the maximum for one bounded push, inside the role's budget
- External cap: platform spend, separate and separately billed
What does the FTE do near the limit?
As spend approaches the per-FTE budget, the morning brief warns, with the proportion of the cycle elapsed shown beside it so the manager can judge whether the pace is right. If the budget is reached, the FTE pauses its discretionary work, proposes what it would do with more, and continues only what the manager approves; if the wallet is empty, everything pauses under the hard stop.
This is why an empty wallet is rarely a surprise: a role's budget warns first, and the manager has decided about it before the organization-wide stop is reached.
How should the budget be set and reviewed?
Set it from the role's expected work in the first cycle and accept that the first cycle is a measurement. At the monthly review, read usage for the role against the budget and against the outcomes recorded in Targets: a role consuming its budget with rising outcomes is doing its job; one consuming it with flat outcomes has a remit or model-tier question; one well under budget can be sized down or given more scope.
Budget changes are permissioned to the role's manager within the wallet and logged, so the history of a role's budget is part of the audit trail.
What is it often confused with?
It is confused with the plan, which is the wallet's size and an owner-level decision; the per-FTE budget is a manager-level bound inside it. It is confused with a target, as if the role should spend it; it is a ceiling. And it is confused with external spend, such as ads, which is bounded separately and billed elsewhere.
It is sometimes assumed that a higher budget makes a role work harder. It does not; the role's work is set by its remit and targets, and the budget only bounds what that work may cost.
Where do you see it in the workspace?
In Setup, where it is set; in the morning brief, where spend against it appears daily; in the Performance tab, where usage for the cycle is shown; and in the audit trail, where every change is recorded with who made it.
Related terms: token wallet, mission, hard stop, usage per role, cost per outcome.
A useful first-cycle habit is to set the budget slightly above what the expected work implies and read the brief's spend line daily, so that the second cycle's budget is set from a real usage figure rather than a guess.