Design cost centres, budgets and rules

Buyer spend limits

Per-contact limits and how they interact with rules.

A spend limit is the amount one person may commit without asking anybody. It is the control that decides how much of the customer's ordering never touches an approver at all, which makes it the setting most worth getting right.

Before you begin. There are two per-person amounts in the platform and they do different jobs. Read the table below before you set either, because configuring the wrong one produces a policy that looks correct and enforces nothing.

Two limits, two questions

Limit	Lives on	Answers
Personal spend limit	The contact, in the Cost Centers app, optionally per cost centre	How much may this person spend before a request is raised?
Approval limit (`order_approval_limit`)	The contact, in the Customers app	How far does this person's signature reach when approving somebody else's request?

A workshop manager with a €1,000 spend limit and no approval limit orders consumables all day and signs for nobody. A site manager with a €500 spend limit and a €25,000 approval limit orders very little on their own account and signs off a great deal — which is a perfectly ordinary and quite common arrangement in a company where the person with authority is not the person who does the ordering.

Setting the approval limit on someone who does not approve does nothing. Setting the spend limit on someone whose role cannot place orders at all does nothing either — see Contacts and roles.

Global or per cost centre

A personal limit can apply everywhere, or only to a particular cost centre.

Global — one ceiling for everything this person orders. The right default, and what most customers mean when they say "he can spend up to two thousand".
Per cost centre — the facility manager may spend €5,000 on building services and €300 on anything else. Use it where somebody's authority is genuinely narrow, not to express every nuance of an org chart.

Where both exist, the cost-centre limit governs lines booked to that cost centre and the global limit governs the rest.

How limits interact with rules

The limit is not a grant and it does not act on its own. It is read by the personalLimit condition on an approval rule, and the rule's effect decides what happens.

Order of resolution on a submit:

Is the cost centre usable on this line? If restrictions rule out every cost centre for a line, there is nothing to book it to and the submit cannot proceed.
Does any rule prevent? A hard stop wins over everything below it. No request is created, no order.
Does any rule route? Every matching pendingOrder rule opens a decision. A personal limit exceeded and a budget exceeded are two matches, so both signatures are collected.
Nothing matched? The order is created directly and the budget is consumed in one movement.

Two consequences worth stating plainly to a customer:

A generous personal limit does not defeat a budget rule. Somebody with a €10,000 limit still raises a request when the cost centre has €400 left, if there is an availableBudget rule on it.
A tight personal limit does not protect an unbudgeted cost centre. It produces approvals, not control. If the customer's worry is the annual total, they need a budget, not a lower limit.

Set one

Open the contact in the Cost Centers app and set the personal spend limit. Leave it empty where the person should have none.
Add per-cost-centre limits only where the customer named a specific case.
If the same person also approves, set their order_approval_limit on the contact in the Customers app.
Confirm the rule with the personalLimit condition exists. Without it the limit is documentation.

Temporary changes

Limits move. Somebody covers a colleague's Elternzeit, a shutdown week needs higher ceilings, a project runs for a quarter.

Raise the limit, and write down the date it goes back. A limit raised for a two-week shutdown and never lowered is the commonest way a customer's approval policy quietly stops matching the policy their auditor was shown. Put the reversion date somewhere it will be seen — a task in the customer's own system, or a note on the contact's timeline; see Customer activity.

For anything longer than a few weeks, the better answer is usually a deputy on the cost centre rather than a raised limit. A deputy is reversible by removing one row and leaves a clean record of who decided what; a raised limit leaves no trace of why it was raised.

Do not raise a limit to clear a stuck queue. It works, and it also silently approves everything else in flight for that person. Reassign the decision instead — see Approvals that get stuck.

What to check

Have the contact submit a cart just under their limit against a cost centre with budget available. An order should be created directly.
Have them submit one just over it. A purchase request should appear.
Check somebody with a per-cost-centre limit on both a line booked to that centre and a line booked elsewhere. The two lines should behave differently.

Approval rules — the rule that reads the limit.
Let the customer administer it themselves — hand the limits over.

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Approval rules

Who approves what, above which value, in which order.

Let the customer administer it themselves

Delegating cost centres, budgets and approvers to the customer's admin.