The Master Budgets tab is where you can see, edit, and schedule all of your media budgets for all of your media channel types. The amount of money you can budget at any given time is limited by your "Orders" tab. Orders are your invoices, and as a safety, you can only budget for the amount of media you have already ordered - this prevents risk from unintentional overspend. An accidental "extra zero" or two, won't amount to a catastrophic mistake, again, because you can only budget to spend the amount of media dollars you already have available in your "Available Media Budget This Month" figure showing in your Ordering tab.
Master Budgets is where you're able to quickly launch media across channel, or set your channel defaults, so that media automatically launching across your default list of channels any time you launch a new campaign from the campaigns page. This feature allows you to launch cross-media campaigns in mere seconds - a process outside of Media Cloud that would take a team of media managers days or weeks to achieve.
Channel budgets works in percentages, so that as your flexible campaigns adjust, the overall budgets being spent are always adjusting proportionally - but without you having to come back and do manual math or manual adjustments. This keeps the system fully automatic for everything that matters, so that the media that is running is always aligned to your goals but in consideration of current performance. You have control within each channel from the Channel tabs of each media type so after adding a new channel to a campaign in Master Budgets, say, by putting 10% of your accounting budget into accountant-targeted banners - you may want to then visit the banner ads channel page in order to upload new banner ads into that campaign that specific target accountants.
In addition to controlling all of your various flexible and programmatic budgets, this page gives you a quick snapshot up top of the overall spending this month, including your committed job contracts and the prorated monthly cost implied by all of your "Miscellaneous Ad" tags.
The most important budget for the month is the overall flexible budget for the month which you can edit up at the top of the page. The budget scheduler at the top allows you to set budgets for any future months also, and please note that if this is not set, your media buys will go dark as the month changes over to the next month. Out of caution, we're not spending any money that isn't authorized as a default, as you may have a strategic reason to go-dark on media one month - but if not, the best way to insure continuity is to populate your entire monthly budget schedule as far into the future as you can. It can be edited at any point in time prior to the month, and even during the month after the campaign has already started running. (Though budgets can never be reduced to an amount that is lower than what has already delivered for the month according to the real time spending reports on your Reports tab.)
