Budgets for incentives 🪙

If you've been paying for incentives in Ethnio using invoices or a credit card, you already know the basic flow: you request an invoice, set permissions, and then pay for incentives with that invoice or maybe a credit card. Budgets work a bit differently, and once you understand the shift, it's genuinely better for most teams.

The core idea is this: instead of paying for each incentive order with an invoice or credit card, you add funds to a named budget, and then draw from that budget when issuing incentives.

Think of it like a dedicated spending account for research incentives. You top it up using the same payment methods you already use (invoice or credit card) and then it sits there, ready to use, with full editing and visibility into who spent what and when.

Budgets in Ethnio let you pay for participant incentives, as well as add, remove, and transfer funds between budgets as you'd like. This is a bit superior to only using invoices or credit cards, because you can manage budgets any time, and track by team or by individual spending. All Ethnio plans are receiving budgets as an additional way to pay for incentives.

Default budget

To get started, head to Incentives > Budget > Create budget. Next, give the budget a name, add a description (optional), and then configure the budget permissions. By default, Ethnio allows everyone in your account to access the budget, but you can restrict access to only specific people or teams if needed.

Adding funds

To add funds to a budget, go to Incentives > Budgets > Add funds. Enter the amount you’d like to add, then select which budget to fund. Some details:

• There is no minimum
• You can add funds by either Invoice or Credit Card
• If you change your mind later, you can always transfer funds later to a different budget
• Once everything is selected, click Pay Now to add the funds to your budget.

Permissions

By default, everyone in your account has access to a budget. When creating or editing a budget, you can customize permissions by choosing one of these access options:

• Option 1: Individuals (specific people)
• Option 2: Teams (Enterprise only)

If you limit access to specific people, you can select individual team members or admins. If you limit access to teams, you can search for and select one or more teams that should be allowed to use the budget.

Teams

One of the best parts of budgets is that you can use teams for permissions instead of adding or removing individuals. Then spending is automatically tracked by budget and team. New email reports can be setup  to then get a monthly email with budget spending or team spending, sent to any emails you'd like.

Transferring Funds

Move available funds from one budget to another. Simply enter the amount, select the source budget and destination budget, then click Transfer Funds. For visibility, you’ll be able to review the available balance in the source budget and the remaining funds after the transfer.

Budget email report

Once a budget is funded and in use, you can set up an automatic email report to keep stakeholders informed on spending. From a budget's detail page, click Create budget report in the right-side panel.

This is useful for finance approvers or research ops managers who want visibility into incentive spending without needing to log into Ethnio. All scheduled budget email reports are managed under Reports → Scheduled reports in the left nav.