Where the budget goes, and what it returns.
Most budget reviews arrive too late to act on and flatter the spend along the way. Decifer tracks the marketing budget planned versus spent, how much of it is actually working media, and the return on it, by business unit, computed from your own figures, with utilisation never hand-entered.
“Fully spent” is not the same as working.
A budget can be fully utilised and still be working badly: drifting into the wrong unit, or eaten by fees and production before any of it reaches an audience. Utilisation on its own is a comfort metric, it tells you the money left, not whether it did anything.
Decifer’s job here is to keep the money honest: pacing against plan per unit, the working-media share made visible, and the return judged against the multiple you set, not a number chosen to look good in the deck.
What we won't do
- Call a budget healthy just because it was spent on time.
- Hand-enter utilisation, the engine computes it from your figures.
- Promise a return up front, we measure ROMI against your target.
What the module computes.
Three views of the marketing budget, each sliced by business unit and computed from your own figures.
Budget pacing
Planned vs spent, by unit
Utilisation tracked against plan for each business unit, so an overrun is caught while there is still budget to protect, not at the year-end reconciliation. The variance is computed from your figures, never entered.
What we measure
Spend against plan, and where utilisation is pacing past the threshold you set.
Working-media share
How much actually reaches the market
The split between working media and the fees, production and platform costs around it. A budget that looks fully spent can still be doing very little if too much of it never reached an audience.
What we measure
The share of spend that is working media versus non-working overhead.
Return on investment
Against your target, not a vanity multiple
Return on marketing investment worked out from spend and outcomes and set against the target you choose, broken down by unit, so the question is whether the money is paying back, not whether the dashboard looks busy.
What we measure
ROMI by unit against target, and investment per acquisition.
How it works, step by step.
The budget review a sharp finance partner runs, kept honest by computing the pacing rather than accepting it.
Bring in the budget
Planned, revised and spent figures per business unit and category, uploaded from your finance file or entered by hand, into your isolated workspace.
Compute utilisation and variance
Budget utilisation and variance against plan are calculated by the engine for each unit, never typed in, so the pacing number can be trusted.
Split working from non-working
Spend by category is resolved into working media versus fees and production, so you can see how much of the budget is actually reaching the market.
Work out the return
Return on marketing investment and investment per acquisition are computed from spend and outcomes and judged against your target multiple.
Issue the decision
Where the budget is pacing wrong, where it is going non-working, and where the return is below target, with a plain statement when the data cannot settle it.
One decision, reasoned end to end.
A measured signal, what it means, and the move. The numbers below are illustrative.
A unit is on-budget but barely reaching the market.
Signal
One business unit is at 96% budget utilisation, comfortably on plan, yet its working-media share is only 48%, well under your 60% floor. Its return on investment sits at 1.9x against a target of 3.0x.
What changed
The unit looks fine on the only number most reviews quote, it spent what it was given. But more than half of that spend went to fees and production, so very little reached an audience, and the return shows it. On-plan spending masked a working-media problem.
The move
- Rebalance the unit's mix toward working media before the next flight.
- Hold the non-working categories to a share, not just an absolute budget.
- Re-judge the unit on ROMI and working-media share, not utilisation alone.
Lifting working-media share toward the floor is the difference between a budget that was spent and one that worked.
What the module reads.
Your budget file, uploaded as CSV or XLSX, or entered by hand, both work today. No channel API is required. Every figure is computed, never invented.
Utilisation, variance and the working-media split are all engine-computed from the figures you bring, they are never hand-entered, so the pacing you act on traces back to a formula you can read. Return on investment is judged against the target multiple you set, not a default chosen to flatter.
See where the budget really is.
Bring your budget file, and the pacing, working-media share and return appear the same day, by unit.