Calculate acquisition-spend days after fixed commitments
A campaign can fit a quarterly budget and still exhaust cash before its next review. A reproducible illustrative example with editable inputs and explicit limits.
A campaign can fit a quarterly budget and still exhaust cash before its next review. This worksheet calculates a simple spend runway after subtracting committed costs. It uses cash actually assigned to the programme rather than projected lifetime revenue that may arrive much later.
Define the calculation before using it
Enter assigned cash, fixed obligations paid from it and a constant daily spend assumption. Subtract obligations, then divide the remainder by daily spend. If obligations exceed cash, the negative remainder is a funding gap; zero spendable days is the operational output, not a negative calendar date.
Work through the synthetic example
A programme with 30,000 cash units, 6,000 committed and daily spend of 1,200 has twenty days of runway. Changing daily pace changes that horizon immediately. A documented review date should therefore be tied to the current cash model, not simply copied from the date in an older campaign brief.
| Output | Worked-example result |
|---|---|
| Cash after commitments | 24000.0000 |
| Spend runway days | 20.0000 |
Use the artifact and preserve its assumptions
Open the editable calculator to change the inputs and inspect the sensitivity view. The CSV records synthetic inputs and expected outputs; the JSON fixture keeps the equations available for reproduction. These calculations have been checked against the stated example. No measured campaign data is included.
The sensitivity rows vary only daily by 20% below and above the entered value. They are scenarios, not confidence limits or a forecast distribution. A row outside the model’s constraints is labelled rather than turned into a plausible-looking result. Save the chosen inputs with the decision so another reader can distinguish a changed assumption from a changed formula.
Evidence and limits
Google distinguishes served cost from billed cost after adjustments. Choose and document the cost basis used in this worksheet; its production, contribution and cash assumptions are our teaching examples, not provider benchmarks. See Manage your spend in Google Ads, especially “Access your billing and cost data; View costs from reports”.
Incoming cash, varying payment dates and uneven delivery are excluded. This does not replace a dated cash-flow schedule or promise a platform’s constant delivery.
Background: Annual and quarterly UA budget planning and A Q4 UA Budget Planning Checklist Before the Rush. These existing articles provide context; the present calculation does not verify every archived claim.
