How to get your Finance team on board with uncapped budgets

For many marketing and performance media leaders, the biggest blocker to demand-led growth isn’t Google’s algorithms, competitive CPCs, or the limitations of campaign management. It’s Finance.

Finance teams carry the burden of predictability: forecasts must be accurate, cash flow must be protected, and margins must be defended. To them, “uncapped budgets” sound reckless, similar to a blank cheque. For Paid Media teams, fixed budgets feel just as restrictive, capping growth and putting them permanently on the back foot.

The question isn’t whether budgets should be flexible. It’s how Marketing and Finance can work together to make uncapped budgets both credible and safe.

Start with Finance’s world, not yours

It's important not to talk about media metrics. Finance doesn’t care about impressions, CTRs, or even ROAS in isolation. What they care about:

• Forecast accuracy and predictability - how close your sales or demand forecasts are to reality
• Working capital and cash flow - the money your retail business has tied up in day-to-day operations (inventory, receivables, payables)
• Inventory turnover and stock risk - measures how quickly your stock is sold and replaced
• Protecting gross margin under pressure - preserve your margin, especially if costs rise or discounting is needed to shift stock

When you begin the conversation, anchor everything in these terms. For example: “When we flexed budget in Q4 to support seasonal stock clearance, it improved inventory turnover and released cash two weeks faster.” 

Insights and narratives like this reframe the conversation from the media’s world to Finance’s.

Build the case together

Credibility comes when Finance helps set the rules. That means:

• Agreement and sign off on guardrails up front - minimum margin % or cost-of-demand floors, so extra spend only happens if profitable.
• Proving incrementality - use geo holdouts, causal impact models, or matched market tests so Finance can see the uplift that would have been lost under fixed budgets.
• Running scenarios - show Finance the missed sales during demand surges (payday weekends, TV exposure, promotions) and contrast them with flexible budget outcomes.

As we explored in one of our articles, Limited by Budget: the silent killer of PMax potential, those missed surges don’t just reduce clicks, they restrict profitable growth and hold back PMax’s ability to learn.

We see the most powerful approaches when cases aren’t just “marketing asks.” They’re joint models, with Finance’s hand in defining the assumptions.

Translate media metrics into commercial terms

ROAS alone won’t win Finance over, nor the rest of the business. You will need to reframe media outcomes into the levers they already manage:

• Gross profit contribution - revenue after ad spend, before overheads.
• Cash flow impact - how flexing spend accelerates order-to-cash cycles and frees working capital tied up in stock. For a multi-billion-pound retailer, this isn’t about survival, it’s about capital efficiency. Even a one to two week improvement in stock clearance can release millions.
• Elasticity ratios - “Every extra £1 of media produced £3 revenue at our margin floor, and here’s where diminishing returns set in.”
• Inventory effects - aligning spend with supply to move slow-turning or high-holding-cost stock.

In our second article, From clicks to contribution: measuring Demand-Led Growth the right way, we showed why ROAS is not enough. Finance cares about incremental returns, margin protection, and cash flow. Framing the data this way turns media from a cost centre into a working capital lever.

Create a governance process

Finance will only back flexibility if they see ongoing discipline. Therefore, this requires:

• Shared dashboards that are designed in Finance language (profit contribution, margin %, cost of demand).
• Regular reviews - weekly/monthly sessions where you review budget flex decisions, outcomes, and exposure (keep in mind attribution windows for the full picture).
• Decision logs - clear records of when and why spend moved, creating an audit trail that builds trust in Finance and credibility across the organisation

This rhythm will bring Marketing and Finance closer, transforming Finance from “approvers” into your partners.

Let technology be the neutral enforcer

Even the best joint model falls down if Finance thinks spending relies on gut feel alone. Technology removes that risk.

In our world, Upp.ai, in combination with Google’s PMax, enforces the agreed guardrails automatically. Budgets only flex when conditions meet pre-set rules, profitability floors, ROI thresholds, or category-level constraints. Finance sees exactly where incremental £s went, and what they returned, in terms that tie directly to the P&L.

For Finance, that’s assurance. For Marketing, it’s freedom to capture every profitable opportunity without the handbrake of a fixed budget.

Getting Finance on board isn’t about persuading them to “spend more.” It’s about building trust, proving incrementality, and showing how flexible budgets actually protect the business by improving cash flow, accelerating stock turn, and scaling only when profitable.

This is the third part of our Demand-Led Growth series. In part one, we explained what Demand-Led growth is. In part two, From clicks to contribution, we showed how to measure real business impact beyond clicks. 

Bringing Finance on board with uncapped budgets is the next step, because once Marketing and Finance are aligned, uncapped doesn’t mean a lack of control.