Plan-keyed sponsorship budgets when pushing decisions

What this is

When you push a decision or plan to your network, you can attach a sponsorship budget to it: a number of IUs, set per franchisee, that your network pool pays before the franchisee's own balance is touched. This is different from generally funding the network pool. A plan-keyed budget is scoped to that one push. It exists so you can say, in effect, "I want every franchisee who gets this plan to be able to act on it with AI help, on the network's dime, up to this many IUs each" without having to fund a blanket amount and hope it gets used the way you intended.

The budget is optional. Leave it blank and the plan pushes exactly as it always has: franchisees see it, work it, and pay for any AI assistance from their own IU balance.

Where to find it

The budget field lives inside the Push dialog, which opens from a decision or plan's detail view via the Push to franchisees button. You'll find plans to push from your HQ sidebar's decision and playbook views.

The pool balance the budget draws against, and the full record of what's been drawn, live under Settings → Sponsorship in your HQ sidebar, and at the full history page linked from there ("See full history"), reachable at hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship.

The Push dialog, element by element

When you click Push to franchisees on a plan, a dialog titled Push: [plan title] opens.

• Intro line. If every franchisee in your network has already received the plan, it reads: "Every franchisee in your network has already received this plan." Otherwise: "Pick the franchisees you want to push this plan to. Each will get an in-app notification and a detail page they can acknowledge, work on, or decline." If some franchisees already have the plan, a sentence is appended naming how many "have already received it and are listed below for reference."
• Select all N eligible. A checkbox that selects every franchisee who hasn't already received the plan. Next to it, a live counter shows how many you currently have selected.
• Sponsorship budget per franchisee (IU, optional). A number field, defaulting to blank (shown as placeholder "0"). Whatever you enter here is the IU cap the network pool will cover for each newly pushed franchisee, individually, on this plan. The helper text next to the field explains it plainly: "Franchisor pays this many IU per operator first, then the operator's own balance covers any remainder. Leave blank for no sponsorship."
• Budget-vs-pool check. As soon as you've entered a budget above zero and selected at least one franchisee, a line appears showing what you're about to commit: "Commits [budget × selected franchisees] IU vs. [current pool balance] IU in the pool." If your pool has enough to cover the full commitment, the line reads "pool covers this commit" in green. If it doesn't, the line turns red and adds: "[shortfall] IU short. The cap is a ceiling, not a pre-payment, so the push will still succeed, but drawdowns will pause once the pool runs out. Fund the pool via Settings → Sponsorship before franchisees hit the cap."
• Franchisee list. Every franchisee in your network directory, each with a checkbox. Franchisees who already received the plan are grayed out and can't be reselected; instead of a checkbox interaction, they show their current status as a label: Pushed, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed. If your directory has no franchisees yet, the list shows: "No franchisees are listed in your network directory yet."
• Push button. Reads "Push to N franchisee(s)" where N is your current selection count, and switches to "Pushing…" while the push is in flight. It's disabled until you've selected at least one franchisee.
• Cancel. Closes the dialog without pushing anything.

If you try to push with nobody selected, the dialog shows "Pick at least one franchisee." If you type a budget that isn't a whole number of zero or more, it shows "Per-operator budget must be a non-negative whole number."

How the cap actually works

The phrase "ceiling, not a pre-payment" in the warning is the core mechanic to understand, so it's worth walking through directly.

1. 1You push the plan with a budget. Say you push to 8 franchisees with a budget of 200 IU each. That's a total possible commitment of 1,600 IU, but nothing is spent yet, that number is just an upper bound.
2. 2A franchisee starts working the plan. When a franchisee who received a sponsored push does AI-assisted work tied to that specific plan, the network pool pays first, up to their individual 200 IU cap.
3. 3The pool covers the spend as it happens, one franchisee at a time. Each franchisee draws down against their own 200 IU cap independently. One franchisee using their whole 200 IU has no effect on another franchisee's cap on the same plan.
4. 4Once a franchisee's cap is used up, their own IU balance takes over. Further AI work on that plan by that franchisee spends their own IUs normally. Nothing breaks; sponsorship for that franchisee on that plan is just finished.
5. 5If the pool itself runs dry before caps are reached, sponsored draws pause network-wide. This is the scenario the red warning is trying to help you avoid: you committed more than the pool can currently cover, so some franchisees may hit a "the network can't sponsor this right now" wall mid-plan even though their individual cap isn't exhausted. Fund the pool from Settings → Sponsorship to keep draws flowing.

Where the draws land

Every IU the pool spends on a franchisee's behalf for a specific plan shows up in your ledger as a line reading Franchisee drawdown, in the Network pool bucket, attributed to the franchisee it was drawn for.

You can see this two ways:

• Settings → Sponsorship, which shows your current pool balance, prepaid balance, stipend reserve, and spendable total, plus a preview of the five most recent ledger lines.
• The full history page (linked from Settings → Sponsorship as "See full history", at hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship), which lists every ledger entry with columns for When, Reason, Bucket, Operator, Initiated by, and Delta, plus running all-time totals for pool funded, stipend earmarked, drawn by franchisees, and onboarding granted.

A plan-keyed drawdown is not the same ledger event as a general pool grant to a franchisee. When you fund the pool itself (a separate action under Settings → Sponsorship), that shows as "Admin funded pool." When a franchisee actually spends against a plan's sponsorship cap, that's the "Franchisee drawdown" line, and it is a direct payment from the pool for that franchisee's work, it does not add anything to the franchisee's own IU balance the way an onboarding stipend grant does.

If your pool has never been funded and no plan has ever drawn against it, the ledger will read: "No pool activity yet. Once you fund the pool, every grant, draw and refund shows up here" (on the Settings tab), or the equivalent full-page version: "No pool activity yet. Once the pool is funded the first time, every grant, draw and refund shows up here."

Using it well

• Set the budget before you push, not after. The sponsorship cap is fixed at push time for each newly pushed franchisee. If you push without a budget and want to add sponsorship later, that's a separate action, not something you edit on an already-pushed row.
• Watch the commit-vs-pool line before you click Push. It's doing the math for you: budget times the number of franchisees you've selected, against what your pool can actually cover right now.
• A generous per-franchisee budget on a wide push adds up fast. Ten franchisees at 500 IU each is a 5,000 IU commitment. Check the warning line, not just the per-franchisee number, before you push wide.
• Already-pushed franchisees can't get a sponsorship budget added retroactively through this dialog. They're shown for reference only, with their adoption status, and stay grayed out.

Related help

• Fund your network's IU pool
• Grant onboarding stipends to new franchisees
• Push a decision or plan to your network
• Reading your network's IU ledger