Why doesn't a player's wage look right in the budget?

Full walkthrough: Set the budget and play out scenarios in the guide covers the budget end to end; this page catalogues the per-player oddities.

How the forecast is built — the two headline figures, the scenario picker, the cap, the summary row and the wage bill — is covered in How does the senior budget and salary cap forecast work?. This article is for the other question: the number in front of you is for one player, and it isn't the deal you remember signing.

A knockout campaign lets you promise money you only owe if the team gets there. On a Championship contract, any custom bonus wage line can be tied to a stage — the line's "Pays once we reach" dropdown offers Group stage, Quarter-final, Semi-final, Final and Champion. It's optional: leave it on Not tied to a stage and the bonus behaves like any other, and a deal that simply continues a player's current weekly needs no stage line at all.

The forecast prices these against the campaign you're planning for. Because the Championship has no historical form to project from, the Planner replaces the usual performance bands with a finishing outcome — Champion, Runner-up, Semi-final exit, Quarter-final exit, Group stage — eliminated or Group stage — winless. Pick one and the forecast counts every stage bonus up to that point and ignores the rest, so you can see what a deep run would cost before you sign it. Each bonus is costed as a one-off lump sum, not a weekly.

This dropdown only appears on Championship contracts. An NPL deal has no progression ladder to price against, so offering the choice there would produce a commitment the forecast could never account for.

Contracts are pro-rated by the part of the season they actually cover, so a mid-season signing or an early termination only counts for its own window. When you terminate a contract you can set a weekly pay after termination — leave it blank if pay simply stops, or enter a full or reduced weekly amount and the forecast keeps paying it through to season end.

The forecast prices payments, not contracts. So a player who is signed and on the roster but shows nothing in the budget has a contract with no payments recorded against it — most often a deal signed on paper and filed as a document before its schedule was entered.

Open the contract and check its Documents section. If the signed agreement is there, Clubhouse can read it and offer to bring the payments in — see How do I record a contract signed on paper?. Otherwise enter them in the Payments panel. Either way the wage reaches the forecast, the wage bill and the cap as soon as the payments are saved.

A single deal can cover the Australian Championship and the following NPL season at different rates, by giving each weekly payment its own start and end date. A dated weekly payment is costed on the weeks between its own dates, at its own rate, so the unpaid gap between the two competitions costs nothing. Dated appearance, win, draw and loss fees work the same way, at each competition's own rate.

Each roster then shows only its own window's cost, and the two add up to the salary printed on the contract. A player on $500 a week for the six Championship weeks and $800 a week for the 30 NPL weeks appears as $3,000 on the Championship roster and $24,000 on the 2027 roster, totalling the $27,000 on his agreement. Neither roster shows the whole deal on its own: each budgets for the competition it runs.

An undated weekly payment behaves as it always has, spread across the whole season and pro-rated by the part of it the contract covers.

Every figure in the budget header — see How does the senior budget and salary cap forecast work? — is priced across the roster's pay window, and that window was set before the fixture list existed. So if the season ends up longer at either end, there are matches nobody is being paid for, and nothing else in Clubhouse would ever tell you.

Needs attention, above the roster table, does: how many matches fall before the window opens or after it closes, and where the window came from — the roster, the competition's rules, your season dates in Settings, or dates worked out before the draw was published — since that decides who can change it. The last of those is yours to correct on the roster.

Nothing is altered automatically and this is not a breach. Existing contracts still pay exactly what they say, and the answer is the club's: vary the deals, pay the extra rounds as a bonus, or leave it. A competition with no fixture list says nothing here, because nothing was checked — that includes the Australian Championship, so a quiet campaign roster is not an all-clear.