Setting a monthly budget for each AI employee

Give each AI employee a monthly budget so that one busy employee can never spend what the rest of the team needs. In xMap Flows the budget is a number of credits for the month: at 80% its owner and the organization's admins are warned, at 100% it pauses itself, and one click raises the budget and starts it again. Pick the first number from what the employee is expected to use in a month, with some room on top, and adjust it after a month of real runs.

This article is for whoever owns the bill: an operations lead, a finance partner, a team admin. It explains what the budget covers, what happens at each threshold, how to pick a sensible number without guessing, and how budgets fit with the team and organization limits above them.

What the budget covers

An AI employee uses credits when it does paid work: searching for places, reading data from outside services, the AI reading and scoring results, sending messages. Its budget counts all of that for the calendar month. Triggers, filters, sorting and other logic cost nothing and never count.

The budget is the same number as the flow's Monthly credit limit. You can set it in the employee's panel (click its picture on Flows) under Monthly budget, or from the flow's menu; changing one changes the other.

What happens at 80% and at 100%

How a monthly budget behaves. The card's bar is amber from 80% and red when the budget paused it.

The pause is a pause, not a failure. Nothing is lost: its results, settings and history stay, and nothing it found is sent twice when it starts again. A run that would have gone over is simply not started.

Raising it in one click

The notice, the email, the employee's card and its panel all carry a raise button. It adds about half as much again to the budget, and an employee the budget paused this month starts working at once. You can also type a number of your own in the panel, or take the budget off so only the team's and organization's limits apply.

Two other places offer the same raise. In the Team inbox, a reply such as "raise the budget" in the employee's thread does it. In the weekly review that the Monday email links to, each employee's card has Raise its budget beside Keep, Change it and Let it go.

Raising a budget, like deploying, is for the employee's owner or an admin with the Deploy permission.

Choosing the first number

1. Before deploying, look at the estimate beside Deploy: what one run costs on its current settings and roughly what a month of its timetable comes to.
2. Add room for a busy month. An employee that watches for openings finds more in some weeks than others.
3. Set that as the budget and deploy.
4. After a full month, look at its report card and panel: what it actually used and whether it found what you needed.
5. Tighten or loosen. An employee that sits at 30% every month can have a smaller budget; one that hits 80% by the third week either deserves more or needs narrower settings.

A made-up example

Say a franchise group in Sao Paulo runs four AI employees: an Opening watcher for bakeries, a Rival watcher following one competitor, a Sales scout ranking new restaurants as wholesale customers, and a weekly brief that reads the other three. They give the Sales scout the largest budget, because its AI scores every restaurant it finds, and the weekly brief a small one, since reading the team's own findings costs little. In the third week a burst of openings takes the Opening watcher to 80%; the owner gets the warning, sees on its card that it found twice its usual number of bakeries, and raises it from the email. Nothing else in the team is touched.

How it fits with the other limits

• Employee budget: one flow, one month. The narrowest limit.
• Team quota: if your organization uses teams, what everyone in a team spends together each month. An employee counts toward its owner's team.
• Organization spending limit: everything the organization spends in a month.
• Daily caps on outside services: separate from money. They protect the services everyone shares and reset each day.

A run must fit every limit that applies. When one is reached, the message says which one, so you know whether to raise the employee's budget or talk to whoever sets the team's quota.

Mistakes to avoid

• No budgets at all. Everything then draws on one shared pool, and a single misconfigured search can drain it overnight.
• Budgets so tight they pause every month. A paused alert employee is worse than none, because people assume it is still watching.
• Raising without reading. The warning is a moment to check that the extra spending is buying extra results.

To see what each employee produced for what it used, see how AI employees report their week.