Recurring budgets offer agencies efficient ways to manage ongoing client work and maintain financial stability.

For instance, imagine a marketing agency that secures retainer agreements with clients for services like social media management and advertising campaigns.

Similarly, consider a web development agency that relies on maintenance contracts, ensuring that client websites receive timely updates and technical support.

In both cases, managing these recurring commitments using automatically generated budgets improves resource utilization and simplifies operations.
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Productive automates these processes by creating recurring budgets based on your agency's needs, whether triggered weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at other intervals.

In this article, we'll look at how to create recurring budgets and the best ways to incorporate them into your agency workflow.

To set up a recurring budget in Productive:

In the "Recurring" tab, under the "All monthly budgets" section, you can view a list of all recurring occurrences.

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 feature enables immediate budget creation rather than waiting for the next scheduled occurrence.

Currently, scheduling individuals on future (recurring) budgets that haven't yet started or been created is not supported in Productive.

In other words, you cannot assign people to inactive budgets.

However, you can manually trigger the next budget occurrence, which allows you to create bookings for the newly generated budget.

Productive gives you flexible options when managing bookings on recurring budgets, but how and when you create bookings can affect how they're assigned.

📌 There are three scenarios to keep in mind:

If you’ve already created bookings on the current budget and then trigger the next occurrence (either automatically or manually), Productive will automatically reassign each booking to the correct new budget based on the dates.

​Example: You create repeating bookings in March (tied to the March budget) and then trigger the April, May, and June budgets—each future booking will be moved to its corresponding monthly budget.

In this case, if you repeat a booking after generating future budgets, the repeated bookings will remain linked to the original service and budget.

​Example: You trigger budgets for April–June, then create a booking in the Resource Planner and repeat it for three months. All those bookings will stay on the April budget unless you manually adjust them or trigger another budget occurrence.

👉 Important: Bookings don’t automatically reassign to the next available budget or service unless a new budget occurrence is triggered after they’re created.

If you create a single booking that spans multiple months—say, one continuous assignment from April through September—and then trigger the next 6 recurring budgets, Productive will automatically split that long booking and assign each part to the appropriate monthly budget. This method is especially useful for managing long-term allocations without creating multiple separate bookings.

​Example: You create a single 6-month booking for a designer on the April budget. After triggering the next 6 budget occurrences, the booking will be split and reassigned—April’s portion stays on the April budget, May’s on the May budget, and so on through September.

If all your bookings are assigned to a single budget, whether because of timing or setup, Productive will attribute all those hours to that one budget in your forecasted profitability charts.

This can skew your planning data and make it harder to evaluate workload across the recurring periods.

👉 To avoid this, follow the booking scenarios outlined above so that hours are correctly distributed across each recurring budget.

Productive now includes the option to copy expenses on recurring budgets. When setting up a recurring budget, you can enable the option to copy expenses for each occurrence.

If this option is turned on, any expenses in the original budget will be copied to the new recurring budget.

Note that while expense attachments, custom fields, the expense description and the amount you added to the original expense will be transferred to the new budget expense, the expense payment status will be reverted to Unpaid and the payment date, as well as reimbursement details, will not be copied to the new expense details.

The date of the new expense will be updated to match the start date of the new budget. For instance, if the new budget starts on August 1st, the expense dates will also be set to August 1st.
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In case you have expense approvals switched on, the new expense will not be automatically approved. The approver (budget owner) will receive a notification each time the budget is created.
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Original expense:

Copied expense:

With the Retainer Hours Rollover feature, you can carry over unused or overused hours from one budget period to the next.

When creating or editing a recurring budget, you can enable the "Roll over unused hours to next occurrence" option.

This addition allows you to track how many hours are rolled over each month, giving you valuable insights into service profitability. For more details, refer to our article on Retainer Hours Rollover.