Budget at overrun-risk
This page explains one figure: how much of your planned budget sits in programs that delay has put at risk. Read it before quoting that figure to anyone, because it is a risk flag and it is easy to mistake for a forecast.
What it is
It is the planned budget of every program that is currently in trouble. A program counts as at risk when it is overdue, or when it has open work no one has reviewed for risk — or both. InaiBridge adds up those programs' planned budgets and shows you the total.
What it tells you is where your money is concentrated relative to your delivery problems. If a large share of the portfolio's planned budget sits inside programs that are slipping, that is worth your attention today, whatever the eventual spend turns out to be.
The figure always arrives with its own arithmetic attached — the sum it came from, and the condition that selected each program — so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
What it is not
:::danger It is not a forecast, and it must not be read as one
It does not say anyone will overspend. It does not predict a final cost, an overrun amount, or a variance. There is no "this program will come in $2M over" in this figure, and if you ever see a number like that presented as InaiBridge's prediction, it is wrong.
It does not measure actual spend. InaiBridge is not reading your finance system here. It knows what was planned, and it knows what is late. It does not know what has been spent.
It is an inference from delay, not a measurement of money. The signal underneath it is schedule slippage. Delay often precedes cost trouble, which is exactly why the flag is useful — but "late" and "over budget" are different facts, and this figure only knows the first one.
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The honest sentence is: "this much planned budget is exposed to delay-driven risk." The dishonest sentence is: "we are going to overrun by this much." The first is supported by your data. The second is not, and InaiBridge will decline to produce it.
Why we ship the risk flag before the forecast
True budget forecasting — actual versus planned, variance, a projected final cost — requires actual spend figures from your finance or ERP system. InaiBridge does not hold those yet. Connecting them is a later capability.
We could have produced a forecast-shaped number from the data we do have. We deliberately have not, because a plausible number with nothing real behind it is worse than no number: it gets quoted in a board paper, and nobody can tell it was invented. So you get the flag we can stand behind now, and the forecast when the actuals exist to support it.
What it covers, and what it leaves out
A program can only contribute to this figure if it has a planned budget recorded. Some programs do not.
Those programs are excluded and named as excluded — the figure is always reported as covering so many of so many at-risk programs, with the shortfall stated. An at-risk program with no budget on record is a gap in your data, not a program with nothing at stake. It is never quietly counted as zero, because a zero would make the total look complete when it is not.
If that exclusion count looks high, the fix is to record the missing budgets — not to adjust the figure.
Asking about it
You can ask Mira about this directly on the Portfolio surface: "how much of our budget is at risk of overrun?" She will give you the figure with its arithmetic and its coverage.
If you ask her how much you will overspend, she will tell you she cannot answer that, explain that there are no actual spend figures to answer it from, and offer the risk figure instead. That refusal is deliberate and it is the feature working.
Related: Numbers only where they belong explains who is shown money figures at all, and Grounding & memory explains why "how much money is at risk" has more than one honest answer.