Ad Account Pacing via Claude: How Agencies Catch Overspend and Underspend Before Month-End. Evido Practices

A client's budget rarely gets spent evenly across the month. Teams usually catch up on a shortfall in the last few days by sharply raising budgets: campaigns go back into learning and CPA climbs. It is most visible in peak periods like Black Friday. The platforms do not help much: a spending limit simply stops the ads, and neither Meta nor TikTok tracks pace against a plan.

With one client, you can keep pacing in a spreadsheet. With dozens, manual reconciliation takes days. Through MCP, Claude pulls the picture for the whole portfolio in a single request, so you can get a fresh snapshot every few days.

The Evido by Aitarget client care team monitors the health of the entire portfolio that runs through the platform. An agency needs more precision and faster reaction on its own accounts. The setup below continues the first article in the series, on the morning check: the digest catches day-to-day deviations, while pacing shows where a client will land at the end of the month.

How to calculate pacing

Pacing is the rate of spend relative to plan: how far a client is ahead of or behind plan as of today. It shows a deviation by mid-month, while budgets can still be adjusted gradually. You need three numbers: pace, forecast and the required daily budget.

Pace is calculated like this:

Forecast shows where the client will land at the end of the month at the current pace:

Required daily budget is what the media buyer sets directly in the ad account:

Each client then falls into one of three zones:

These thresholds are a starting point. Each agency sets its own for its clients.

The first days of the month are noisy: one expensive day shifts the pace by tens of percent. We recommend turning on pacing flags from the 5th–7th of the month. Until then, the morning digest is enough.

Where Claude gets the plan

Meta and TikTok MCP return spend. The plan is not in the ad account, so you need to provide it separately.

The simplest option is to keep the plan in Google Sheets and connect the Google Drive connector to Claude. A CSV uploaded to the chat works too. The minimum set of columns:

Lock the plan at the start of the month: the budget per ad account and platform agreed with the client. If the plan changes mid-month, update the spreadsheet the same day.

Three things that most often throw the calculation off:

• One client can have several ad accounts. The plan is checked against the total of all their accounts on both platforms: one row per account, a total per client.
• The month boundary follows the ad account's time zone. Accounts in different time zones close the month at different times.
• The platforms return spend in the account currency. If the plan is in a different currency, give the exchange rate and its date in the prompt.

Lifetime budgets and campaigns with an end date also distort the picture. They spend unevenly, so a linear pace gives an inaccurate reading for them. Mark such campaigns in a separate column of the spreadsheet.

Why an ad account overspends or underspends

These are the causes we see most often when we look at the Evido portfolio as a whole.

Overspend:

• the budget was raised for a promotion and never reverted;
• a campaign was duplicated, and both copies are spending;
• the plan was cut mid-month, but the budgets in the account stayed the same;
• the auction got more expensive in season, and daily spend grew with the same settings.

Underspend:

• the balance ran out or a payment failed;
• ads are rejected or under review;
• a campaign went back into learning after edits;
• the audience is too narrow or the bid too low.

When a flag fires, we recommend checking in this order:

1. Balance and account status.
2. Ad review.
3. Account and campaign spending limits.
4. Campaign settings: budgets, bids, audiences.

The first three take a minute to check and explain most underspend.

After a flag, Claude uses the same connectors to find the campaign causing the deviation and suggests a hypothesis. The media buyer checks it and decides.

Prompt template and check cadence

Below is a prompt template. It is convenient to save it in a separate Claude project and run it on your check schedule:

Calculate pacing across the portfolio as of today.

Plans: the "Plans [month]" spreadsheet in Google Drive.
Data: spend from the 1st of the month through yesterday via Meta and TikTok MCP, read-only.
Use each ad account's time zone. Exchange rate for currency conversion: [rate, date].

For each client, calculate: actual spend, plan, pacing in %, end-of-month forecast, required daily budget.
Zones: above 110% = overspend, below 90% = underspend.

Output format:
1. Overspend, sorted by the size of the deviation in money, largest first.
2. Underspend, sorted the same way.
3. On track: one line, number of clients only.

For each flag, name the campaign causing the deviation, and check the balance, account status and rejected ads.
Do not change anything in the ad accounts.

Sort by the amount of money. A 30% overspend on a $1,000 budget is smaller than 5% on a $50,000 budget.

The cadence we recommend to agencies:

• checkpoints on the 10th and 20th of the month across the whole portfolio;
• daily in the last 7–10 days of the month;
• ad hoc, whenever a client's plan changes.

What this setup does not do

• Claude only reads data; a person changes the budgets. With client accounts, write access for an AI agent raises the question of who is responsible for its changes.
• Pace is calculated from your plans spreadsheet. If it is out of date, the calculation will be inaccurate.
• With hundreds of ad accounts, the report takes longer to build because of API limits.
• A linear pace does not account for sales and holidays. For such clients, set the plan by week.

Clients without a fixed monthly plan do not need this setup.

Pacing and balance: look at them together

Underspend often happens because the ad account ran out of money. Some overspend eats the balance ahead of time, and the ads stop at the end of the month. That is why, when we check portfolio health, we look at pace and balance together.

What the Evido by Aitarget platform covers. Meta, TikTok and other platforms' ad accounts, their spend and balances are visible in one dashboard. You can top up accounts from a single wallet. There is no need to build a "client → ad accounts" spreadsheet: the mapping already exists in the platform.