Spend Pacing

Benchmark is how much of the quarter has gone by — exactly as you defined it, days elapsed divided by days in the quarter.

Projection takes your most recent 3 weeks of actual spend and carries that rate across the days left in the quarter. It starts from money already spent and only adds.

Weekday and weekend are rated separately, because weekend spend runs roughly a quarter of a weekday. Each rate is then applied to the actual number of weekdays and weekend days remaining.

A single blended rate would only be right when the window and the days ahead share the same weekday mix. Three whole weeks happen to (15 weekdays, 6 weekend), but a 25-day window is 76% weekday and would inflate the projection by about 2 points. Splitting removes that dependency.

Using a trailing window rather than the quarter average means the projection reacts to how you are spending now. If you cut budgets last week, that shows up within days; a whole-quarter average would keep dragging months-old spend along.

Remaining days are counted exactly, so partial weeks and month boundaries look after themselves — nothing is rounded to whole weeks or months.

So projected % > 100 means you finish over budget at the current rate. The gap between Used and Benchmark is the early warning — the tick mark on every progress bar is the benchmark, so a bar past the tick is ahead of the calendar.

It does not model seasonality, planned pauses, or budget changes. It can never land below what you have already spent — if you ever see that, the formula is wrong.

Projected Q3 in the table is always a quarter-level number, even when you are viewing a single week or month, because pacing against a quarterly budget is what it answers.