Budgets, Facturas, and Spend Tracking

Money is where project tools quietly lie: a budget cell someone typed three weeks ago, a paid total nobody reconciled. Saberra's spend layer is built so the numbers you see are the numbers in the records - computed, sourced, and honest about gaps.

The money model

• Quoted (on a task) is the agreed full price of that piece of work - a contractor's quote or cotización.
• Total Quoted (on a project) is the sum of its tasks' quotes. That is the budget, and it computes itself.
• Spend is the ledger: one row per factura/invoice/quote, carrying its Ref (the "#6", "F124" shorthand everyone already uses), the Invoice Amount, and the Paid Amount.
• Every factura links to both its task and its project, so both stay accurate.
• Only Paid Amount moves the totals. As payments go out, the project's Total Paid climbs toward Total Quoted. Remaining budget is always the difference between the two real numbers.

Getting facturas in

Email them. A factura PDF sent or forwarded to your capture address becomes a Spend record - Sera reads the amounts, the ref number, and the vendor, and links it to the right work when it can. Mentioning the same Ref in a later email updates the same row rather than creating a duplicate, and a paid figure only ever accumulates upward.

You can also just tell Sera: "Log factura #12 from Rolando, $2,450 for the roof work." Sera proposes the record, you confirm, it writes.

The honesty rules

Three protections you will notice, all deliberate:

1. Totals are reported verbatim from the records. When you ask "where is Rancho against budget", the quoted and paid figures come from the rollups, and a blank amount is reported as "not recorded" - never silently treated as an estimate.
2. Paid needs proof. Sera will not mark a factura Paid on someone's word. It asks for a concrete verification source - a bank reference, the payment receipt - and writes that source onto the record as an audit trail.
3. Payments never un-happen. A paid amount cannot be silently lowered. A genuine correction is done in the open: archive the record and recreate it with the story in its notes.

Non-USD amounts

Amount columns display in dollars, so mixed currencies would produce a wrong-but-official-looking total. When a factura is in colones or another currency, the currency is named in the record's Notes and flagged rather than silently mixed in.

Seeing the picture

Ask Sera "budget status of [project]", "what is unpaid?", or "outstanding balance on factura #8". Ask for a picture and you get one: "chart spend by project" draws a bar chart from the same rollups, and every value in it comes from records pulled for that answer rather than from an estimate. The weekly project status email carries each project's quoted / paid / remaining line. And in Notion, the Budget Watch view lists every budget-bearing item with its spend.

Key points

Quoted on a task is the agreed price of that piece of work; a project sums its tasks into Total Quoted - the budget, automatically. The Spend ledger holds one row per factura/invoice, with its Ref number as the shared shorthand, linked to both its task and its project. Only Paid Amount moves the totals: as you pay, the paid figure climbs toward the quote. Email a factura to your capture address and Sera records it - amounts, ref, vendor - and the same Ref accumulates into one row instead of duplicating. Marking a factura Paid requires citing a real verification source (bank reference, receipt), and a paid amount can never silently go down. Blank amounts are reported as "not recorded", never guessed.