What You Can Do
Once you’ve connected your AI assistant, it can read your budget, make changes for you, and draw on your Marketing Brain. Ask in plain language, the way you’d ask a colleague.
Explore Your Budget
Find Line Items and Spend
Describe what you’re looking for and your assistant finds the matching line items, along with their planned and actual amounts for each month. You don’t need exact names — “social media” will find LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads, and TikTok Ads.
Example: “Show me my social media line items and their planned spend for Q3 2026”
Compare Planned Versus Actual
Get a breakdown of where you’re over or under budget for any month, by line item, by category, and for the budget as a whole.
Example: “Which line items are over budget this month?”
See Spend by Channel
Look at your budget by marketing channel, such as Paid Search, Events, or SEO, with totals rolled up for the period you ask about.
Example: “How much is planned for paid media channels this quarter?”
Check Budget Versions
See which versions a budget has, which one is active, and what each one holds — its target budget, line item count, and when it was created.
Example: “What versions does our 2026 budget have, and which one is live?”
Update Your Budget
Add Line Items
Create new line items in any category you have access to. You can set planned or actual amounts in the same request. New items start as drafts with you as the owner.
Example: “Add a TikTok Ads line item to the Paid Social category with $5,000 planned per month for Q4”
Set Planned and Actual Amounts
Update amounts for one line item or many, across as many months as you need.
Examples:
- “Set the planned amount for TikTok Ads to $5,000 for October through December 2026”
- “Update September actuals: booth $12,500, speaker package $4,800, travel $2,750”
Approve, Reassign, and Reorganize
Change a line item’s approval status, owner, category, name, or cost center. Your assistant reports back what changed, showing the old and new value for each item.
Examples:
- “Approve all Q2 line items under $5,000”
- “Make Sarah the owner of the events line items”
- “Move the webinar platform line item to the Tools category”
Create Categories
Add new categories or subcategories to organize your budget. This requires admin permissions.
Example: “Create an Events category with subcategories for Conferences and Field Marketing”
Use Your Marketing Brain
Your Marketing Brain is your organization’s marketing knowledge base: personas, products, channel strategy, metric definitions, and campaign learnings. Your assistant can use it to give answers grounded in how your team actually works.
Search and Read
Ask a question and your assistant searches your Marketing Brain, reads the relevant entries, and summarizes what it finds.
Example: “What did we learn from last year’s LinkedIn campaigns?”
Save New Learnings
When a conversation turns up something worth remembering, such as a result, an insight, or a decision, your assistant can save it to your Marketing Brain. It confirms the title and wording with you first.
Example: “Save this as a learning: webinars with a customer co-host converted twice as well as solo webinars in Q2”
Put It Together
The real value comes from combining these in one conversation, alongside everything else your assistant can do.
Leadership Updates
Scenario: You need a short spend summary for your CFO.
Example: “Summarize our Q3 marketing spend by channel and draft a short update explaining the biggest variances”
Result: A draft built on your real numbers, ready for you to edit.
Planning with Context
Scenario: You’re deciding where to put next quarter’s budget.
Example: “Based on our campaign learnings and this year’s spend by channel, where should we consider shifting budget next quarter?”
Result: Suggestions that draw on both your numbers and what your team has learned.
What Your Assistant Can’t Do
The plugins work with your budget data inside Etropo, and nothing else. Your assistant can’t:
- Pay invoices or move money — Etropo plans and tracks budgets; it doesn’t make payments
- Change your ad campaigns — it can’t pause, edit, or launch anything in Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads, or any other platform
- Create or activate budget versions — do that in the Etropo web app, where the impact on your integrations is shown as it happens
- Delete anything — it can’t remove line items, categories, or Marketing Brain entries
- Overwrite protected amounts — months backed by expenses and line items synced from an ad platform are skipped, and your assistant tells you why
Everything your assistant reads and writes applies to the active version of your budget.
Best Practices
- Be specific — say what you’re looking for and which month, quarter, or year you mean: “Q1 Google Ads spend” gives better results than “show me everything”
- Name the budget — if you have more than one, say which one you’re asking about
- Review changes — updates save straight to your budget and can’t be undone automatically, so read your assistant’s summary and check the result in Etropo
- Mention Etropo — if your assistant doesn’t use Etropo on its own, ask it to: “Using Etropo, …”
Support
For additional help you can reach out to our support team at: help@etropo.com