For ongoing client work (retainers, maintenance contracts, monthly services), recreating the same budget every period is time-consuming and error-prone.
Recurring budgets solve this by automatically generating a new budget at a set interval, carrying over services, expenses, and settings each time.
You can set one up manually from an existing budget, or have one created automatically when you win a retainer deal.
Recurring budgets are available on Professional and Ultimate subscription plans.
Creating a Recurring Budget From a Retainer Deal
You can also create a recurring budget directly by winning a retainer deal without going through the manual setup below.
When a retainer deal is marked as Won, the win flow includes a Recurrence setup step where the period and number of periods are inherited from the deal. Productive then generates all budget periods automatically.
👉 See Winning a Retainer Deal for the full walkthrough.
Setting up a Recurring Budget
To set up a recurring budget in Productive:
Navigate to the desired budget, head over to the Recurring tab, and select the "Create a recurring budget" option.
Choose the recurring interval (weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannually, annually) and specify the date for the next occurrence. This date marks when Productive will automatically generate a new budget.
Optionally, define an end date for the recurring budget, or leave it blank for indefinite recurrence.
Additional Settings
1) Copy the Purchase Order Number
Carry the purchase order (PO) number from the original budget into each new recurring budget. This ensures consistency for clients who require the same PO reference on every invoice.
2) Recurring Budget Expenses
Choose whether to copy expenses from the original budget into each new occurrence. If enabled:
All expenses from the original budget will be duplicated in the new budget.
Expense attachments, custom fields, descriptions, and amounts will be copied.
However, the payment status will reset to Unpaid, and payment dates or reimbursement details will not be copied.
The expense date will be updated to match the start date of the new budget.
If expense approvals are required, the copied expenses will remain unapproved, and the budget owner will be notified to review them.
Original expense:
Copied expense:
3) Roll Over Unused Hours
Enable Roll over unused hours to next occurrence to carry forward unused (or overused) hours from one budget period to the next. This helps you:
Keep track of hours that accumulate month to month.
Understand service profitability more accurately.
👉 For more details, refer to our article on Retainer Hours Rollover.
4) Create Invoices Automatically
Set up automatic invoice draft creation for each new recurring budget occurrence.
👉 Learn more in Automatically Create Invoice Drafts from Recurring Budgets.
Saving and Editing the Setup
Save your settings by selecting Make recurring.
If any adjustments are needed later, select the "Edit recurring" option or halt the recurrence altogether by selecting "Stop recurring".
In the "Recurring" tab, under the "All monthly budgets" section, you can view a list of all recurring occurrences.
Manually Triggering the Next Occurrence
While recurring budgets are automatically generated based on the specified interval, you also have the option to manually trigger the creation of the next budget.
This is particularly useful when you need to work with future budgets that haven't been generated yet—for example, if you need to plan resources for upcoming months.
This feature enables immediate budget creation rather than waiting for the next scheduled occurrence.
Scheduling People on Future Recurring Budgets
You can’t schedule people on future recurring budgets that haven’t yet started or been generated in Productive.
To create bookings for a future period, manually trigger the next budget occurrence first. Once the budget exists, you can assign people to it as needed.
Recurring Bookings
The way bookings are assigned on recurring budgets depends on when and how you create them.
👉 For examples and best practices, see Recurring Bookings on Recurring Budgets.