Introducing Budget Tracking: Take Control of Your Influencer Marketing Spend

71% of brands increased their influencer marketing budgets this year, showing this channel's growing importance. 

But effective budget management goes beyond just influencer payments. Marketers must also allocate funds across different program types (ambassador, affiliate, etc.), and some even need to distribute budgets across multiple sub-brands.

To simplify this complex process, we're introducing Budget Tracking in Aspire.

What is Budget Tracking?

Aspire’s new Budget Tracking system introduces a multi-layer, flexible structure for brands to control their budget from one master account. This is the central hub from which brands can plan their spend for each of their projects. 

Prior to this update, most brands tracked their influencer marketing spending on spreadsheets or third-party software. Now, with our Budget Tracking tool, you can manage your campaign spend accurately — without ever leaving Aspire. Ultimately, this will enable brands to track and manage project spend in a simple, seamless way. 

Budget Tracking at a glance

• Flexible budgets: Set up annual, monthly, or project-level budgets without spreadsheets.
• Payments tracker: View creator payments with filters, tags, and status updates.
• Centralized dashboard: Monitor all payments in one place with exportable data.
• Notes & Tags: Add context to payments for better tracking.

How does Budget Tracking work?

1. Define your fiscal year. You’ll first define how your company tracks the fiscal year so that our calculations are in line with your business operations. This will determine how budget data is displayed and reported across the platform.
2. Set up your Master Budget. Once your fiscal years are defined, the next step is to set up your Master Budget. This will be the main budget source for all of your Aspire projects and the foundation upon which all your budget accounts will be built.
3. Set up budget accounts. You can create budget accounts from your master budget to allocate funds to specific projects, teams, or types of members. This is helpful if you know that a portion of your master budget will be allocated to different initiatives or teams.
4. Connect budget accounts to your projects. You can assign one or multiple budget accounts to a project to monitor your total spend for a specific campaign.

For detailed instructions on setting up Budget Tracking, see this article.

Bonus: Payments Dashboard 

Our new Payments Dashboard gives you visibility into all payments initiated through Aspire. Whether you're checking on a single payment or reviewing payments across multiple campaigns, this dashboard gives you real-time visibility into your payment activity.

Key Features:

• Real-time visibility: Track all creator payments across campaigns in one centralized view.
• Summary insights: Get a quick snapshot of total payments, spend, processing status, and payouts by type.
• Detailed payment table: See all individual payments with key details like status, amount, type, and project.
• Flexible filters & search: Quickly find payments by status, project, tags, team member, and more.
• Bulk actions & customization: Tag, edit, or export multiple payments at once and tailor your dashboard view.
• In-depth payment view: Dive into any payment for full context, including member info, notes, and timeline.
• Assign briefs to fiscal periods: Brands can bulk-assign fiscal years to briefs based on project budgets, ensuring accurate budget tracking and reporting. Only briefs linked to budgeted projects can be assigned.

For detailed instructions on setting up your Payments Dashboard, read this article.

Budget Tracking and the Payments Dashboard are available to all Aspire customers starting today. Log in to your Aspire account to get started.

Not on Aspire yet? Get in touch to see this feature in action.