Budget Runs Out Before Year-End

Start with the Legal Definition — "Budget" Is Not Just Money Paid Out

Before blaming the tool, it is worth revisiting how the law defines budget expenditure. Thailand's Budget Procedure Act B.E. 2561 (2018) states that budget expenditure means "the maximum amount permitted to be paid or to be obligated, for the purposes and within the period specified in the annual appropriations law."

That phrasing matters enormously, because the ceiling covers both money already paid and obligations already incurred. Signing a contract or issuing a purchase order consumes the budget quota immediately in legal terms, even though not a single baht has left the bank account.

A tracking tool that records payments only is therefore not merely "slow to update" — it measures the wrong variable from the start, and does not match what the law counts as budget consumption.

Reserved / Committed / Accrued — Three States Excel Cannot See

In practice, money does not jump straight from "allocated" to "paid". It moves through several intermediate states, and each one consumes real budget to a different degree. Thai public-sector budget reporting names these states explicitly: จอง (reserved), ผูกพัน (committed), and ค้างจ่าย (accrued, pending payment).

State	Occurs when	Can it be reversed?
Reserved	The request is approved, but no procurement action has been taken yet	Yes — no counterparty yet
Committed	A purchase order is issued or a contract is signed	Difficult — contractually bound
Accrued	Goods or work are accepted and the claim is submitted, awaiting payment	No — it is a payable
Paid	Cash actually leaves the account	No — transaction closed

The Structural Problems of Tracking Budgets in Excel

Many organizations still use Excel as their primary budget-tracking tool. The problem is not that the people doing it are careless — it is that the tool was never designed for this job, which connects to the broader risks of running core operations on spreadsheets.

1. Data Is Not Real-Time

Excel waits for someone to update it. Procurement issues a purchase order but has not yet told the budget office. The budget office opens the file, sees the figure, and believes budget remains — when in fact it has already been committed. That lag routinely runs into weeks, and it is always longest at fiscal year-end when documents arrive all at once.

2. Multiple Versions, Multiple Editors

Finance opens "budget_v3_final_revised.xlsx" while procurement opens "budget_v3_final.xlsx". Different versions, mismatched numbers, and nobody can say which one is authoritative. When two departments report different figures in a meeting, most of the meeting is spent working out who holds the correct file rather than making a decision.

3. No Record of Reserved or Committed Amounts

This is the biggest gap. Most spreadsheets record only how much has been paid, because that is the figure with clean documentation to copy from. Reserved and committed amounts have to be chased document by document through procurement — and nobody has time to do that daily.

4. No Automatic Budget Blocking

Nothing in Excel enforces "this category is exhausted, no new procurement documents". Whoever issues the purchase order issues it, unaware the budget is already over. The overrun surfaces at period close, which is precisely when the month-end close is under the most pressure anyway.

Remaining Balance vs Available Balance — Two Numbers, Read Together

When people say "remaining budget" in a meeting, they frequently mean different numbers. That is the root of the misunderstanding: there are two kinds of balance, and mid-year they diverge sharply.

Take a category with an allocation of 1,000,000 baht:

Item	Amount (THB)	Visible in Excel?
Allocated budget	1,000,000	Yes
Less: paid	400,000	Yes
Less: accrued (accepted, awaiting payment)	150,000	Usually not
Less: committed (PO issued / contract signed)	350,000	Usually not
Less: reserved (approved, not yet procured)	80,000	Usually not
Remaining balance (allocation − paid)	600,000	The figure Excel reports
Available balance (net of all three states)	20,000	The figure you can actually decide on

The two numbers differ by a factor of thirty. An executive looking at 600,000 could comfortably approve a new 300,000 initiative, when the genuinely available budget is 20,000. A month later, once every document has reached finance, the balance goes negative — without a single person having broken a single rule.

Why the Error Peaks at Fiscal Year-End

Year-end is when spreadsheet-based budget tracking distorts the most, because the rules on carrying funds forward hinge directly on the "committed" state.

Under the Comptroller General's Department framework, budget that cannot be disbursed within the fiscal year may only have its disbursement period extended for items the budget-receiving unit obligated before the fiscal year ended, with funds reserved in accordance with the regulations. Section 42 of the Budget Procedure Act B.E. 2561 then allows a unit to agree with the Ministry of Finance to extend the carry-forward reservation by up to six months, and by a further six months where necessary.

In other words, the "committed" state is the line between a budget item surviving into the next year and being forfeited. An organization without timely commitment figures cannot say which items to prioritize for signature before year-end and which to let go — which is exactly when procurement and the budget office end up reconstructing the numbers document by document.

The Figures You Need to Track — Not Just "How Much Was Spent"

Figure	Meaning	Can Excel do it?
Allocated budget	The budget appropriated to the unit	Yes
Reserved	Approved requests with no procurement action yet	Hard — chase each approval document
Committed	POs issued or contracts signed, not yet paid	Hard — needs daily coordination with procurement
Accrued	Accepted and claimed, awaiting payment	Hard — sits in a different file from the budget
Paid	Cash actually disbursed	Yes
Available balance	Allocation − reserved − committed − accrued − paid	No — three middle figures are missing

One More Layer: Multiple Funding Sources in One Organization

Most Thai public agencies and autonomous public organizations do not spend from a single pocket. They hold appropriated budget, own revenue, and support or grant funds, each with its own spending conditions, time limits, and approving authority.

In practice this means a single purchase may draw on two sources at once, and the "available balance" has to be read per funding source rather than as one consolidated figure. Doing that in Excel requires a sheet per source per category, then cross-sheet formulas to roll everything up — the point where formulas break most often and are hardest to audit backwards. On top of that, the expenditure category structure has to stay aligned with the chart of accounts used to produce the financial statements.

Warning Signs That a Budget Is Heading for an Early Exhaustion

Signal	What it means
Budget figures must be requested from finance each time	There is no continuously reliable balance; the number only exists when someone asks for it
Two departments routinely report different numbers	Each counts different states — one counts payments only, the other includes commitments
Budget transfer requests spike in Q3	Some categories are already over and nobody saw it coming, so it gets patched from elsewhere
Overruns are discovered at period close, not at approval	The budget is checked after the fact for reporting, not while the decision is still reversible
Year-end requires counting contracts one by one	Commitments were never recorded as they happened, so the figure is rebuilt from scratch annually

The Solution: Control at the Point of Approval, Not in Hindsight

A budget control system that works in practice rests on four principles, and all four have to take effect before a document moves to the next step.

• Reserve on approval — the moment a purchase request is approved, the system deducts the reserved amount from the budget. The available balance drops that second, with nobody keying anything in.
• Check the budget before approving — the approver sees the available balance on the very document they are about to sign, without opening another file and without relying on memory.
• Alert by utilization level — notify when consumption reaches defined thresholds, leaving time to adjust the plan before the budget is genuinely tight.
• Transfer budget through a system document — if a transfer between categories is necessary, do it as a document with approval steps and a visible route of who has approved it, rather than by editing a number in a file.

The first principle is the decisive one. A system that starts deducting at payment behaves no differently from Excel, because payment is the end of a process that was decided months earlier. Control has to happen at approval — the only point where the decision can still change. This is the same reason executive approval steps add value only when the approver has complete information at the moment of signing, rather than afterwards.

How Saeree ERP Controls the Budget

Capability	Details
Budget plans by category and project	Set budget plans by expenditure category, organizational unit, and project, with a monthly disbursement plan
Separated by funding source	Prepare and manage spending plans separately for appropriated budget, own revenue, and support funds the unit administers itself
Balance shown on the document	Purchase request screens display the plan, reserved, committed, accrued, paid, and available figures for the project being charged, so the approver sees them before approving
All states tracked	Budget reports separate reserved, committed/accrued, paid, and remaining/available columns — using the vocabulary the budget office already works with
Automatic link to accounting	Transactions processed through the system post to the ledger by budget code and funding source without re-keying, so budget reports and financial statements come from the same dataset

Conclusion: When Excel Is Still Enough, and When It Is Not

Excel is still enough when	You need budget control when
There are few categories and a single funding source	There are multiple funding sources requiring separate reporting
The approver and the budget owner are the same person	Several units draw on the same budget pool concurrently
Only a handful of procurement documents per month	Multi-year contracts require funds carried forward across fiscal years
The gap from approval to payment is very short	The gap from approval to payment runs for months

Budgets running out before year-end is rarely a matter of an allocation being too small, and in most cases nobody has spent irregularly either. It happens because the organization decides using numbers that lag the real process by months. Excel reports what has been paid, while the law counts an obligation as budget already consumed.

A budget control tool therefore has to see the same picture the law and the accountants see — not just where the money ends up, but from the moment the pen touches the paper. For the wider view starting at the planning stage, see budget planning and control with ERP.

"A budget is not exhausted when the money is paid. It is exhausted when the approval is signed — and a good system tells you then, not at period close when nothing can be changed."

- Sureeraya Limpaibul, Managing Director, Grand Linux Solution Co., Ltd.

References

• Budget Procedure Act B.E. 2561 (2018), published in the Royal Gazette Vol. 135, Part 92 A, 11 November 2018 — Laws and regulations, Bureau of the Budget · see the definition of budget expenditure and Section 42 on carry-forward reservation
• Rules and procedures for reserving budget funds for carry-forward disbursement — New GFMIS Thai, Comptroller General's Department
• Manual for purchase order (PO) status reports — New GFMIS Thai, Comptroller General's Department