> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aresdeploy.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Budgets and spend safety

> The rules that make it safe to let an AI touch your ad account.

Handing ad spend to software requires trust, and trust requires hard rules rather than promises. These are the rules.

## The spend rules

1. **You set the budget.** Every campaign runs at a daily budget you approved. Ares plans within it.
2. **Increases require fresh approval.** No approved budget ever grows on its own. Scaling a winner is a new decision that comes to you with the data that justifies it.
3. **Launches require explicit confirmation.** No campaign, no matter how small, goes live without you approving the full preview. See [Campaigns](/ads/campaigns).
4. **Pausing does not require approval.** Stopping waste is always within Ares's standing authority. The asymmetry is deliberate: mistakes of stopping cost opportunity, mistakes of spending cost money.
5. **Your card never touches Ares.** Ad spend is billed by Meta to the payment method on your ad account. Ares neither holds nor routes your money. See [Billing](/account/billing).

## Practical budgeting for home services

Some grounding for owners new to paid leads:

* **Think weekly, not daily.** Lead flow is lumpy. Judge a campaign on its week, not its Tuesday.
* **Budget follows capacity.** The right spend is a function of how many estimates you can run. Booked solid is a reason to throttle, and telling Ares "we are slammed" in chat is a complete budgeting instruction.
* **Expect a learning period.** The first days of a new campaign are noisy while delivery settles. Ares does not panic-toggle campaigns during it, and neither should you.

## What Ares watches

Daily, per campaign:

* Spend against approved budget, with pacing anomalies flagged
* Cost per lead against your trade's normal range and your own history
* Downstream quality: are this campaign's leads answering, and are they booking? Since Ares runs the follow-up conversations, it knows

## The failure modes Ares prevents

| Failure                                   | Prevention                                                                 |
| ----------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Runaway spend from a forgotten campaign   | Daily monitoring plus your dashboard showing live spend at all times       |
| Scaling into garbage leads                | Quality signal from follow-up conversations gates scale-up recommendations |
| Death by a thousand tweaks                | Changes batch through approvals; no silent daily fiddling                  |
| Spend continuing while you are overbooked | Tell Ares once; throttling is a conversation, not a settings hunt          |

## Seeing where money went

The dashboard shows spend, leads, and cost per lead per campaign, live. For anything the dashboard does not answer, ask in chat: "what did we spend last week and what did it get us?" returns numbers, not a link to Ads Manager. See [Reporting](/ads/reporting).