Coming soon — a complete guide to spending limits in Monta Hub: cap how much drivers spend, how often they charge, what price they pay and when.
🚧 Coming soon. Spending limits are on the way and aren't available to all operators yet. This article is a preview of what's coming. If you'd like early access, contact Monta support from your Hub.
Spending limits let you put guardrails on how your drivers charge — how much they can spend, how often they can charge, what price they may pay, and when they can charge. Instead of a driver being able to charge without limit, you build a reusable spending rule and apply it to the drivers, vehicles, charge keys or accounts it should govern.
It's built for fleet operators and employers who sponsor charging, and the finance teams that own the budget. You'll find it in Hub → Policies → Spending, where a spending rule is one building block of a Policy alongside Access and Tariffs.
Key concepts
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Spending rule | A reusable set of caps you configure once (spend, frequency, price, weekdays). |
| Subject | What a rule is applied to: an account, a driver, a vehicle, or a charge key. |
| Assignment | The link between a rule and a subject. A rule limits nobody until it's assigned. |
| Cap | A single limit inside a rule (e.g. €50 per day, or 4 charges per day). |
| Period | The window a cap is measured over — daily, weekly, monthly, or rolling 30 days. |
| Refusal (block) | A charge a rule stopped before it started, because a cap was reached. |
What a spending rule can control
A rule can combine any of the four dimensions below. Each is optional — turn on only what you need.
| Dimension | What you cap | Example |
|---|---|---|
| How much (spend) | Total spend per period, and a cap on any single charge | €300 per 30 days, €50 per day, €60 per charge |
| How often (frequency) | Number of charges per period, and number of simultaneous charges | 4 charges per day, 1 charge at a time |
| What price (price caps) | Maximum price per kWh (AC and DC), session fee, and idle fee | No more than €0.60/kWh on DC |
| When (weekdays) | Which days of the week charging is allowed | Weekdays only — no weekend charging |
As you build a rule, Hub shows a live plain-English summary, for example: "€300 / 30 days, €50 / day, €60 / charge, all-in, warn at 80%, 4 charges / day, 1 concurrent, auto-blocks."
1. How much — spend caps
Spend caps are the core of most rules. You can set a total cap for a period and a per-charge cap, and they work together.
- Total per period — e.g. €300 across a rolling 30 days, or €500 per calendar month.
- Per single charge — e.g. no single session may exceed €60, so one expensive fast-charge can't drain the whole budget at once.
- Multiple totals stack. You can set €50/day and €500/month on the same rule; a charge is refused as soon as either is reached. This lets you bound both daily behaviour and the monthly budget.
What counts toward a spend cap
You decide exactly what a cap measures. Each cost component is opted in — nothing is counted that you didn't include:
| Component | Include it when… |
|---|---|
| Energy (price per kWh) | Almost always — this is the bulk of a session's cost. |
| Minimum price | You want a session's minimum charge to count against the budget. |
| Idle fee | You want time spent plugged-in-but-full to count. |
| Start / session fee | You want the fixed per-session fee to count. |
When every component is included, the summary shows "all-in". Caps are always in one currency, shown on the rule.
2. How often — frequency and concurrency
- Charges per period — cap the number of charges in a day/week/month (e.g. 4 charges per day). Useful against accidental or abusive repeat sessions.
- Simultaneous (concurrent) charges — cap how many sessions a subject can run at the same time (e.g. 1 at a time), so one driver or key can't hold several chargers at once.
- Stuck sessions are released automatically. If a charge stops reporting (a charger goes offline, or a session hangs), it's released from the concurrency count after a short delay — so a stuck session can't permanently occupy a slot and lock the driver out of starting a new one.
3. What price — price caps
Price caps limit what a driver is allowed to pay, rather than a running total. A charge that would exceed a price cap is refused before it starts, so drivers are steered to affordable charging.
| Price cap | Effect |
|---|---|
| Max price per kWh — AC | Blocks starting on an AC charger priced above your limit. |
| Max price per kWh — DC | Blocks starting on a DC (fast) charger priced above your limit — commonly the most expensive charging. |
| Max session fee | Blocks charging where the fixed session fee is too high. |
| Max idle fee | Blocks charging where the idle fee is too high. |
AC and DC are set separately, so you can allow everyday AC charging while capping premium DC fast-charging.
4. When — weekday restrictions
You can restrict a rule's subjects to charging on chosen weekdays — for example, "weekdays only, no weekend charging" for a company fleet.
- Pick any combination of Monday–Sunday. Leaving it unset means every day is allowed.
- You can't save a rule that permits no day — a rule that blocks every day is always a mistake.
- Days are local. A rule uses a timezone so "weekend" means the driver's local weekend, not a UTC weekend. If you don't set one, it falls back to your operator's timezone. This matters near midnight: one instant can already be Saturday in Copenhagen while still Friday further west, and the rule respects the local day.
Budget periods — calendar vs rolling
Every spend and frequency cap is measured over a period. You choose fixed calendar budgets or a moving window:
| Period | When it resets | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Every day at 00:00 UTC | Day-to-day behaviour caps |
| Weekly | Every Monday | Weekly allowances |
| Monthly | The 1st of the month | Calendar-month budgets that match payroll/finance |
| Rolling 30 days | Never resets — always the last 30 days | Steady, gaming-resistant allowances (no month-end "reset and spend twice") |
Why rolling matters: a calendar month lets a driver spend the full budget on the 31st and again on the 1st. A rolling 30-day window smooths that — it always looks back exactly 30 days.
Carry unspent budget over (rollover)
By default a period cap resets to zero when the period turns over — a driver who charged nothing this month simply starts fresh next month. For allowance-style budgets (the classic employer-sponsored case) you can instead let the unspent remainder carry forward.
- Configured per cap and off by default, so existing rules are unaffected.
- Each period effectively adds a fresh allowance equal to the cap; spending draws down the oldest allowance first.
- You can bound how many periods a remainder is allowed to travel, and optionally cap the maximum accumulated amount, so carry-over doesn't grow forever.
Example: a €200/month budget with 3-month rollover. A driver who spends €120 in month 1 carries €80 forward; in month 2 their available budget is €280 (€200 fresh + €80 carried).
Warn before block
Set a warn threshold (e.g. 80%) on a spend cap so a subject approaching the limit is flagged before they're locked out — the block shouldn't be the first signal. A warning is raised at most once per period per subject, so it marks the moment the threshold is crossed rather than firing on every charge. Warnings apply to spend caps (they're a percentage of an amount); the charge-count, concurrency and weekday dimensions don't have a warn threshold. An exhausted cap is a refusal, not a warning.
How multiple caps and rules combine
- Within a rule, caps stack and the first one hit blocks. €50/day AND €500/month AND 4 charges/day are all enforced together; whichever is reached first refuses the charge.
- Across rules, the strictest wins. A single charge can be governed by up to four things at once — its account, the driver, the vehicle, and the charge key. All applicable rules are evaluated, and the tightest limit applies. A generous account budget won't override a tight per-driver cap.
Applying a rule to subjects
A rule does nothing until you apply it. From a rule's Applied to tab, choose Apply rule, pick what it should govern, then choose the subject:
| Apply to | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Account | Govern a whole company/account's charging in one place |
| Driver (team member) | Give one employee a personal budget or restriction |
| Vehicle | Cap charging for a specific vehicle regardless of who drives it |
| Charge key (RFID) | Cap charging on a specific key |
- The picker only offers subjects a rule can actually take — it hides rules already applied, archived, or scoped to a different account.
- Remove a rule from a subject at any time from the same tab; it stops governing that subject immediately.
Operator-wide vs account-owned rules
A rule can be owned at two levels:
| Ownership | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Operator-wide | Managed centrally under Policies → Spending; can be applied across your accounts. |
| Account-owned | Belongs to one account and is managed from that account's own Spending limits tab. |
Each account has its own Spending limits tab showing three figures at a glance — rules applied, how many are at or over cap, and charges blocked in the last 30 days — plus the governing rules (each with a meter for that rule's own binding cap) and the refusal ledger filtered to that account. With the right permission, an account can apply existing rules and even author its own; account members see the same information as a read-only card.
Rule lifecycle
- Draft — a rule you're still setting up; it governs nobody yet.
- Active — a live rule that enforces its caps on the subjects it's applied to.
- Duplicate — copy an existing rule as a starting point for a similar one.
- Edit — change caps at any time; changes apply going forward.
- Archive / delete — retire a rule you no longer use. Past refusals it caused stay explainable (see below).
Monitoring and reporting
| Where | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Rule overview | How many subjects the rule governs, and how many are healthy, approaching (warning), or over their cap — plus total used vs limit. |
| Applied to tab | Each subject with a meter showing spend vs its binding cap. |
| Subject → Charges | Completed charges and refusals interleaved, newest first — so you can answer "why couldn't this driver charge on the 29th?" The refusal that explains it sits right next to the successful sessions. |
| Blocked charges | The refusals a rule caused, each recording the rule name and the numbers as they stood at that moment — so a block stays explainable even after the rule is later edited or removed. |
Worked examples
| Goal | Rule |
|---|---|
| Employee monthly allowance | €300 / rolling 30 days, €60 / charge, all-in, warn at 80%. |
| Company car with carry-over | €200 / month with 3-month rollover, €50 / charge. |
| Weekday depot only | Allowed weekdays Monday–Friday (operator timezone); blocks weekend charging. |
| Anti-abuse guardrail | 4 charges / day, 1 concurrent, €50 / day. |
| Price protection | Max €0.60/kWh on DC, so drivers can't run up cost on premium fast chargers. |
What a driver experiences
When a rule would be breached, the charge is refused before energy flows — the driver simply can't start that session, rather than being billed and reconciled afterwards. If a warn threshold is set, the subject is flagged as approaching the cap before that point. Every refusal is recorded so you can explain it later from the Hub.
Employer-sponsored charging (split billing)
Spending limits cap charging; they don't split a bill between employer and driver. If you want the account (employer) to cover charging up to a set price per kWh and have the driver pay the rest, that's a separate feature — split billing. See What is split billing?
Frequently asked questions
Does a rule affect charges that already started? No — caps are checked at the moment a charge starts. Editing a rule applies to future charge starts.
What happens if a driver is subject to several rules? All apply, and the strictest limit wins.
Can an account manage its own limits? Yes — from the account's Spending limits tab, with the right permission, an account can apply and author its own rules.
Do caps include fees and idle time? Only if you include them — energy, minimum price, idle fee and session fee are each opted in per cap.
Availability
Spending limits are being rolled out gradually and may not be enabled for your operator yet. If you'd like them switched on, contact Monta support from your Hub.