define-budget

name	define-budget
description	Capture the two budgets — money (ceiling, comfortable figure, retakes, who pays, renewals) and time (hours per week, weeks available, whether the time is protected). Writes profile/budget.md. Fifth and final intake stage of the spec-led certification workflow.

Define the budget

Two budgets, captured separately because they fail separately. A credential you can afford and have no time to prepare for is as unobtainable as one you have all year for and cannot pay for, and a single "what's your budget" question reliably surfaces only one of them.

Financial

The ceiling and the comfortable figure. Ask for both. The ceiling is where the answer becomes no; the comfortable figure is what they would spend without thinking about it. The gap between them is where most real decisions sit, and a scorecard with only one number cannot score anything into that gap.

All-in, not headline. Say explicitly that the figure should cover the whole route to the credential, not the exam fee: prerequisite exams, mandatory training, partner or membership fees, proctoring, identity verification, and the first renewal. Headline prices systematically understate this, and the research phase is instructed to price the whole route — so the budget has to be stated on the same basis or the comparison is meaningless.

Retakes. Ask whether a second sitting is budgeted. Many exams charge close to full price again, and a user who has not considered it is holding a ceiling that is really half a ceiling.

Who pays. Self, employer, or client. Employer funding usually carries conditions — approved vendor lists, clawback on leaving, a fixed annual allowance with a deadline — and those conditions are often hard filters that the user will not think to mention. Ask.

Recurring cost. Renewal fees and continuing-education requirements. A cheap exam with an expensive annual renewal is not a cheap credential, and this is the cost most easily missed at decision time because it lands long after the decision.

Time

Hours per week, realistically. Push back gently on aspirational numbers. Ask what last week actually looked like rather than what a good week looks like. An over-stated hours figure produces a time-fit score that clears a candidate the user will then fail to prepare for, which is the single most common way this decision goes wrong.

Weeks available. Bounded by the window in profile/objectives.md — read it rather than asking again. If no window was set, ask for a horizon here.

Protected or leftover? A fixed slot in the week is a different thing from whatever time is left over, even at the same nominal hours. Leftover time does not survive a busy month, so a candidate needing sustained preparation should be scored down for a user whose hours are unprotected.

The total is hours × weeks, and it is the number the research phase tests candidates against. Compute it and show it to the user — seeing "forty hours, total" written down frequently corrects the inputs.

Non-negotiables

Anything about cost or time that is a filter rather than a score: cannot travel to a test centre, cannot take weekdays off, cannot pay before the next quarter. These become rows in scorecard/filters.csv alongside the standing positions from objectives.

Write

Replace profile/budget.md, keeping the frontmatter shape:

status: filled
captured: <today, YYYY-MM-DD>
volatility: medium
review_after: <today + 6 months>

This is the last intake stage. When it is written, the profile is complete and build-scorecard can run. Tell the user that, and tell them that the next step freezes the specification before any credential is looked up.