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Budgets

View all budgets to track available, reserved, and spent funds, drill in on payment activity, and download data.

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Written by Sophie
Updated over a week ago

Rally Budgets are where you manage your funds for research, track your payments, and see upcoming spend. Rally is integrated with Tremendous, offering a global, flexible, scalable incentive system for research studies, and integrated with Respondent for external panel recruitment and related incentive payments. This allows for flexible fund management with no upfront commitments, meaning you avoid getting locked up with prepaid credits. Use Rally’s Research Budgets to manage and apply funds any way you want to across both internal incentives and Respondent recruitment fees.

🚨 Managing Budgets requires a Super Admin role type.

Research Budgets

The Budgets page consists of 3 tabs: All Budgets, Payments, and Reservations.

  • Budgets are pools of funds, AKA research budgets, that you can use for the various types of payments that are necessary for research studies.

  • Payments are transactions that describe a payment to a recipient, typically a participant in your research study. Currently payments are for incentives and recruitment fees. Payments use funds from budgets, and allow you to view and track your spending in and across budgets.

  • Reservations are funds that are reserved for an upcoming or active study. Currently for external panel studies, and coming in the future for regular studies. Reservations also draw funds from a budget. Reservations allow you to see upcoming spending and better plan for funds in your budget.


View All Budgets

From the Budgets page, you can see an overview of All Budgets and the total amount of funds Available, Reserved, and Spent for each, and view combined totals at the top.


View All Payments

Payments are transactions that describe a payment to a recipient, typically a participant in your research study. Currently payments are for incentives and recruitment fees. Payments use funds from budgets, and allow you to view and track your spending in and across budgets.

Payment Properties

  • Payment type is an attribute of a payment that describes whether it was an incentive or recruitment fee, and includes the following filterable attributes:

    • Incentive (Tremendous)

    • Incentive (Respondent)

    • Recruitment Fee (Respondent)

  • Recruitment type is an attribute of a study that describes whether the study was using in-house recruited participants (from your People database), or external panel participants (from Respondent), and includes the following filterable attributes:

    • In-house

    • Respondent

From the Payments tab, you can view counts for Total Spent, Recruitment Fees, Incentives, # Incentives Sent, Average Incentive Amount, and Unclaimed Incentives across all budgets.

  • Recruitment fees are payments to external panel providers for providing participants for Studies.

  • Incentives are payments to participants for participating in research studies.

The table shows all transactions and relevant details of each transaction, such as the person/participant, recipient email, payment type, $ amount, payment status, payment study, payment sender, date and time sent, and associated budget.

Customize your view by selecting the 'Columns' button to add, remove, or rearrange columns. Refine your search by using filters or typing a name or email in the search bar.


View All Reservations

Reservations are funds that are reserved for an upcoming or active study. Currently for studies using external panel recruitment, and coming in the future for regular studies. Reservations also draw funds from a budget. Reservations allow you to see upcoming spending and better plan for funds in your budget.

From the Reservations tab, you can view the cards at the top with counts for Total Reserved, Reserved For Fees, and Reserved For Incentives across all budgets.

  • Reserved for fees shows the portion of the total reserved funds allocated for recruitment fees (charged by external panel providers).

  • Reserved for incentives shows the portion of the total reserved funds allocated for incentives.

The table shows all reserved funds and relevant details such as the associated study, study status, recruitment type, $ amount reserved, $ amount spent, and budget.

Understanding and Releasing Reserved Funds

When conducting research studies with external panel recruitment, you'll see the total estimated costs during study creation. Once you confirm you are ready to launch and officially start recruitment, the total estimated costs will be reserved in your budget so that specific portion of funds cannot be used elsewhere intentionally or accidentally. Starting recruitment requires you have enough funds in your selected Budget to cover the estimated costs for the Study; you can add funds in advance to be ready to rock.

After specific study screener applicants that you chose to accept and invite to participate have completed the study activity (interview, unmoderated test), the incentive and recruitment fee reserved for that participant will be paid 24 hours after study activity completion and the amount will move from "Reservations" to "Payments".

When you finish conducting research, you'll receive a final billing receipt for the total number of incentives and recruitment fees per each completed participant. See the next section View Payments Per Budget to view and understand all processed payments.

If needed, you have the option to cancel recruitment from a study and get the reserved money back to return it to "Available" funds. To restore all remaining reserved funds from a specific study (minus any existing payments for completed participants), update the study status for the relevant external panel recruitment study to the "Closed" status. Within a few minutes, any unused reserved funds will be made available once again.


View Payments Per Budget

View all payments, including Tremendous and Respondent incentives and Respondent recruitment fees, sent per each Budget to track funds and usage or follow up.

  1. Navigate to the 'Budgets' tab in Rally.

  2. By default, the 'All Budgets' tab at the top is selected.

  3. Select the name of a Budget to view all payment activity for the selected Budget.

  4. Refine your search by using filters and columns to show the desired data.

Refine your search by using filters and columns to show the desired data.

There are many ways to filter the table depending on the data you're seeking. You may wish to filter by:

  • "Incentive Status" is "Claimed"

  • "Incentive Status" is "Unclaimed"

  • "Incentive Sent At" is within "the past month"

  • "Incentive Study" is "[Study Name]"

  • "Payment Type" is:

    • "Incentive (Tremendous)"

    • "Incentive (Respondent)"

    • "Recruitment fee (Respondent)"

  • "Recruitment Type" is:

    • "In-house"

    • "Respondent"


Export a CSV File of Payment Activity

Easily download all payment activity for any budget, or use filters to refine your search and download specific payment types, such as only incentives or only recruitment fees.

  1. Navigate to the 'Budgets' tab in Rally.

  2. Select the 'Payments' tab at the top.

  3. Refine your search by using filters and columns to show the desired data.

  4. There are many ways to filter the table depending on the data you're seeking. You may wish to filter by:

    • "Incentive Status" is "Claimed"

    • "Incentive Status" is "Unclaimed"

    • "Incentive Sent At" is within "the past month"

    • "Incentive Study" is "[Study Name]"

    • "Payment Type" is:

      • "Incentive (Tremendous)"

      • "Incentive (Respondent)"

      • "Recruitment fee (Respondent)"

    • "Recruitment Type" is:

      • "In-house"

      • "Respondent"

  5. Select the Participants you wish to include in the download using the checkboxes, or select the top checkbox to select all Participants included in your filters.

  6. Select the 'Export' button at the top and select 'Export' in the pop-up window to download the .csv file report to upload into GSheets or Excel as a spreadsheet.

  7. Save the file to your computer, editing the name if desired to easily distinguish.


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