See at a glance whether every budget is on track

The Aigues-Vertes Foundation supports adults living with an intellectual disability. To encourage socialising and build social ties, it has adopted the workings of a village, with its homes, trades and workshops.

Within this setting, each person has their own key worker and planned amounts for the year: transport, leisure, clothing, medical costs, holidays.

Budgets were drawn up in Excel, and actual expenses were recorded in the accounting software, with no link between the two.

To know where a beneficiary stood, you had to look up their expenses one by one, with no monthly view and no comparison with what was planned.

The key worker builds the budget in the tool, line by line. Once complete, it is signed by the beneficiary and by the team supporting them.

Then they see in charts what has been spent compared with what was planned, and can filter the lines that go over.

Rather than having people re-enter what the foundation's accounting software already holds, the tool fetches the transactions every night and files them under the right line using their description.

This is the part that took the most work: off-the-shelf accounting software can't be queried like a simple database, and we had to learn how to read from it and write to it.

The tool handles no spending requests, approvals or blocks: it shows, and decides nothing. The scope stayed the one the foundation asked for: creating budgets and tracking them.

Not widening it along the way meant the effort could be focused where it mattered: the link with the accounts.