Requisition Budget Pre-Check & Remaining-Budget Guard

The problem this kills

You find out a cost center is over budget after the PO is cut - sometimes after the invoice lands. By then the money is committed and the only thing left to do is explain it.

The reason is timing. The budget lives in one sheet, actuals live in your ERP export, and open commitments (purchase orders you've promised but not yet paid) live in a third place. Nobody reconciles all three at the exact moment a requisition is entered - which is the only moment the check actually matters.

This tool moves the check to the front. The instant a request is keyed in, it computes the real remaining budget for that line - budget minus actuals minus open commitments - and tells the requester right then whether there's room. Over-budget requests stop and wait for the budget owner. Nothing reaches your routing or PO step until the money has been checked.

What you'll build

A small, login-protected web app where:

• A requester enters a purchase request (amount, cost center, GL account, period - and multiple lines if needed).
• The tool instantly computes remaining budget for each line: budget − actuals − open commitments.
• It returns a clear verdict: green (proceed), amber (a warning band you set, e.g. within 10% of the cap), or red (this line goes over).
• Green and amber requests pass automatically - but every check is still logged.
• Red requests are held until the budget owner reviews and approves an override with a written reason - or rejects it.
• Every decision is stored with a frozen snapshot of the remaining balance at the moment it was made, so the audit is bulletproof later.
• The approved (or auto-passed) result is handed to your next step - routing, PO creation, or a clean CSV export.

You'll also choose, as a setting, whether open commitments count against budget - because finance teams disagree on this, and it's the single biggest driver of the number.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. This is not a generic template. The very first thing the plan does is ask the AI to interview you - how requisitions are entered today, what your cost center / GL / period codes actually look like, your typical and peak request volumes, your exact warning and over-budget rules, and your messy edge cases (split lines across cost centers, mid-year budget revisions, credits). It reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before building anything.
• A step-by-step build, each step ending in a copy-paste prompt for your AI coding agent.
• The full data model for budgets, actuals, open commitments, requisitions, and decisions.
• The remaining-budget math, with the open-commitments toggle built in.
• The multi-line, multi-cost-center handling so one request can touch several budgets.
• A scheduled refresh so actuals don't go stale.
• A "No API yet?" fallback that runs the whole thing off Google Sheets / CSV imports and produces a clean CSV export in your system's exact columns.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own budgets and requests.
• A complete audit trail - who entered what, who approved or rejected, the reason, and the remaining-balance snapshot at decision time.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate: an over-budget request cannot proceed until the budget owner approves an override with a reason. The tool drafts the verdict; a person decides.
• Duplicate guards keyed on requisition id, so the same request can't be budget-checked twice unless its amount actually changes.

Who it's for

Budget owners and procurement coordinators who only discover overspend after the PO is cut - and who want the check to happen at entry, where it can still change the outcome. If you live in spreadsheets and ERP exports and have never shipped software, this is built for you.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.