"Sponsorship: how HQ funds AI work across the network"

Sponsorship is how a franchisor or multi-location owner puts real money behind its network's AI work. Every AI-driven action a franchisee takes on Verinode IQ, from running a decision to pulling a benchmark comparison, draws on that franchisee's own Intelligence Unit (IU) balance first. Sponsorship is the network-level fund sitting behind that: IUs that corporate has pre-funded so that when a franchisee's own balance runs low, the network's pool quietly fills the gap instead of the franchisee's AI work stopping.

This article orients HQ leaders to the two places Sponsorship shows up in the product and explains what every number and row on each one means.

The two Sponsorship surfaces

Verinode HQ splits Sponsorship into a working surface and a records surface, and it is deliberate about which one does what:

1. Settings → Sponsorship (hq.verinode.ai/settings, Sponsorship tab): where a network admin actually funds the pool or earmarks stipend money, plus a short preview of what has happened recently.
2. Sponsorship (hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship): a full, read-only ledger of every grant, drawdown, refill, and refund the pool has ever processed. This page takes no actions itself; it exists so an admin, auditor, or curious teammate can see the network's complete IU funding history in one place.

Both surfaces read the same underlying numbers, so the balances you see in Settings always match the balances at the top of the full ledger page.

Getting there

• Settings tab: open Settings from the HQ sidebar, then select the Sponsorship tile from the settings hub (or swipe/arrow to it if you're already inside the settings slider). Sponsorship sits alongside Account, Network, Team & Access, Billing, Data & Privacy, and Help.
• Full ledger page: click See full history → at the bottom of the Sponsorship tab, or go directly to hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship.

Every signed-in HQ user, admin or viewer, can open both pages and read them. Only network admins can actually fund the pool or earmark stipend money; a viewer sees the same balances and history but not the funding controls.

The network IU pool, in plain terms

The Sponsorship tab opens with a short explainer, worth repeating here because it's the core idea of the whole feature:

"The network pool covers AI work for franchisees when their own IU balance can't reach a call. Operators always burn their own IUs first; the pool only fills the gap. Sponsorship is expansionary, never gating."

Under the hood, a network's IU sponsorship money lives in three separate buckets. Each one is tracked and spent differently:

| Bucket | What it's for | |---|---| | Network pool | The bulk fund franchisees draw from automatically when their own IU balance falls short during an AI-driven action. This is the "everyday" sponsorship bucket. | | Prepaid | One-time purchases into the network's spendable balance (for example, a corporate-level top-up). It behaves like the pool for spending purposes. | | Stipend reserve | Money set aside specifically for one-time onboarding stipends to brand-new, not-yet-paying franchisees, so they can put real AI work through the platform before they've bought a membership. |

Only the network pool and prepaid balances are counted together as the spendable total, meaning that's what franchisees can actually draw against day to day. The stipend reserve is walled off; it's only ever spent one franchisee at a time, as an onboarding grant.

A closely related, separate mechanism lets a network fund a specific initiative or plan directly (a sponsorship budget attached to that push, capped per franchisee) rather than drawing from the general pool. See Pushing initiatives to your network for how that budget is set when a plan goes out.

Settings → Sponsorship, section by section

Network IU Economy

A short header and the explainer paragraph above. If the pool has been paused (for example, after a billing issue), this section adds a line telling you when it was paused and that new sponsored calls will not draw from it until it's resumed.

Current Balances

Four figures, always shown in whole IUs:

• Network pool, sponsors franchisee AI calls.
• Prepaid, one-time purchases.
• Stipend reserve, earmarked for onboarding grants.
• Spendable total, pool plus prepaid; the actual amount available for franchisees to draw against right now (the stipend reserve is excluded, since it isn't general-purpose spend).

Below the four figures, if the network has an active recurring refill set up, you'll see a line like: "Recurring refill: [amount] IU per cycle · next on [date]." If there's no recurring refill configured yet, the page tells you plainly that there's no active subscription and that you can fund the pool manually using the controls just below.

Fund Pool or Earmark Stipends

Visible only to network admins. Two side-by-side cards:

• Fund network pool, "IUs that franchisees draw from when their own balance falls short." Enter a positive whole number of IUs and click Fund.
• Earmark stipend reserve, "Reserved for one-time onboarding stipends to new contributing-tier franchisees." Same input pattern, feeding the stipend reserve bucket instead of the pool.

Both share an optional Note field (for example, "Q3 FY2026 sponsorship top-up") that gets attached to the ledger entry for your own future reference. Submitting shows a confirmation like "Funded 50,000 IU into the network pool" or "Earmarked 10,000 IU for onboarding stipends," and the button reads "Funding…" while the request is in flight. Entering a non-whole or non-positive number is rejected with "Enter a positive whole number of IUs."

If you're not an admin, this section is replaced with a plain note: "Only network admins can fund the pool or earmark stipends."

1. 1Open Settings from the HQ sidebar and select the Sponsorship tile.
2. 2Decide whether the money is general-purpose (fund the network pool) or reserved for new-franchisee onboarding (earmark the stipend reserve).
3. 3Enter a whole number of IUs in the matching card.
4. 4Add an optional note if you want a record of why this funding happened.
5. 5Click Fund. The balances at the top of the page and the Recent Activity list below update immediately.

Recent Activity

The five most recent ledger entries, each showing what happened, when, which bucket it touched, and the IU amount (green with a plus sign for money coming in, red with a minus sign for money going out). A See full history → link takes you to the complete ledger page. If nothing has happened yet, the section reads: "No pool activity yet. Once you fund the pool, every grant, draw and refund shows up here."

The full Sponsorship ledger page

Header and hero stats

The page opens with the label "Sponsorship," the heading "Network IU Economy," and a one-line description: "Every grant, drawdown, refill, and refund the pool has processed. Funding actions live in Settings → Sponsorship." explicitly pointing you back to the Settings tab if you want to actually fund anything.

Four hero stat cards mirror the Settings tab's Current Balances:

• Pool balance, "Sponsors franchisee calls"
• Prepaid, "One-time purchases"
• Stipend reserve, "Earmarked for onboarding"
• Monthly refill, the recurring per-cycle amount if a subscription is active, or "No subscription yet" if not.

All-time totals

A second row of four cards gives the network's lifetime numbers, independent of current balance:

• Pool funded (all-time IUs ever credited into the pool)
• Stipend earmarked (all-time IUs ever set aside for onboarding)
• Drawn by franchisees (all-time IUs franchisees have pulled from the pool)
• Onboarding granted (all-time IUs actually paid out as onboarding stipends)

These are cumulative counters computed from every ledger row the network has ever produced, so they only grow; they don't reflect what's left, only what has ever moved.

The ledger table

A row-by-row record of every pool transaction, newest first, with these columns:

| Column | What it shows | |---|---| | When | The date and time the entry was recorded. | | Reason | A plain-language label for why the entry happened (see the full list below). | | Bucket | Which of the three buckets the entry touched: Network pool, Prepaid, or Stipend reserve. | | Operator | The name of the specific franchisee tied to this entry, when one applies. Left blank for entries that apply to the whole network rather than a single franchisee (like an admin funding the pool). | | Initiated by | The HQ admin who took the action, "Admin" if their name isn't available, or "System" for automatic entries like a monthly refill running on schedule. | | Delta | The IU amount, shown in green with a plus sign when it added to a bucket, or in red with a minus sign when it drew down a bucket. |

The Reason column can show any of the following, in plain language:

• Admin funded pool, a manual pool top-up from Settings.
• Stipend reserve earmark, a manual stipend reserve top-up from Settings.
• Monthly subscription refill, an automatic recurring refill on the network's active subscription.
• Stripe purchase, a one-time purchase into the prepaid bucket.
• Onboarding stipend grant, a one-time stipend paid out to a specific new franchisee.
• Franchisee drawdown, a franchisee's own AI work overflowed into the pool because their personal balance ran short.
• Refund, IUs returned to a bucket.
• Expired IUs, IUs that lapsed out of a bucket.
• Admin adjustment, a manual correction made by an admin.

If the ledger is completely empty (a brand-new network that has never funded anything), the page reads: "No pool activity yet. Once the pool is funded the first time, every grant, draw and refund shows up here."

What Sponsorship deliberately does not show you

Verinode HQ's core privacy boundary applies here just as everywhere else: franchisees own their own business data, and HQ sees network aggregates and compliance, never a franchisee's private day-to-day operating detail. Sponsorship follows that boundary exactly.

• The ledger shows which franchisee a drawdown or onboarding grant was attributed to (their location name), and how many IUs moved, because that's network financial activity your organization is funding. It does not show what that franchisee actually asked the AI to do, what decision they were working through, or any of their underlying operating numbers. Sponsorship is a funding ledger, not an activity log.
• Onboarding stipends themselves are granted to an individual new franchisee elsewhere in HQ (from that franchisee's own record, not from this page); this ledger only reflects that it happened and how much moved.

Related help

• Pushing initiatives to your network, how a per-franchisee sponsorship budget is set when HQ pushes a specific plan.
• Member Directory overview, where individual franchisee records, including onboarding, live.
• Network overview, the broader network health picture Sponsorship sits alongside.