budget-pacing

Budget Pacing

PREREQUISITE: Read ../_mureo-shared/SKILL.md for auth, security rules, output format, and Tool Selection (Read/Write on Code, mureo_strategy_* / mureo_state_* MCP on Desktop / Cowork).

Track month-to-date spend against the monthly budget target, project the month-end landing, and raise pace alerts so the month neither blows the budget nor leaves it unspent.

This is trajectory management, not allocation. If the question is "how should I split budget across campaigns?" that is /budget-rebalance. This skill answers "at this rate, where does total spend land, and how do I steer it onto the target?" — cross-reference /budget-rebalance when the fix is reallocation rather than a total-spend nudge.

Prerequisites

• STRATEGY.md and STATE.json must exist (run the onboard skill first)

Steps

Before you start: Run the Diagnostic preamble from ../_mureo-shared/SKILL.md — load learning insights (mureo_learning_insights_get) and consult advisors (mureo_consult_advisor) before drawing conclusions.

1. Establish today: call mureo_state_get first, on every host (including Claude Code, where you would otherwise Read the file) and take server_now from its response — ISO 8601 with UTC offset, e.g. 2026-07-28T10:12:33+09:00. Pacing is date arithmetic, so this is load-bearing: server_now's date is the only source of the current date — it fixes the pacing month, today's date, and therefore every elapsed/remaining-day count below. Do not shell out (this skill must run in Bash-less headless hosts) and do not read the date off STATE.json: last_synced_at, reports.*.period and action_log timestamps are history, and pacing against a stale month silently mis-states the landing. Never write server_now into STATE.json — it is a response field, and a persisted copy becomes tomorrow's stale "today".

2. Load context: Read STRATEGY.md (Operation Mode, ## Guardrails, any ## Custom: Monthly Budget section, Goal sections) and STATE.json (the same mureo_state_get response from step 0 on MCP hosts).