What HQ can and cannot see in sponsorship
Verinode HQ lets a franchisor sponsor its network's IU (Intelligence Unit) usage: fund a shared pool that covers franchisee AI calls, earmark a stipend for new franchisee onboarding, and see a full…
On this page
- What this article covers
- Where to find it
- What the Network IU Economy page shows
- The hero stats row
- The all-time totals row
- The ledger table
- Empty state
- The privacy boundary
- The Operator column is franchisee location data, and it is never hidden
- The "Initiated by" column is a teammate identity, and it can be redacted
- What HQ never sees, regardless of any setting
- How to use this responsibly
- Related help
What this article covers
Verinode HQ lets a franchisor sponsor its network's IU (Intelligence Unit) usage: fund a shared pool that covers franchisee AI calls, earmark a stipend for new franchisee onboarding, and see a full record of every grant, draw, refill, and refund the network has processed. This article documents exactly what shows up in that record, what every column means, and where the privacy boundary sits: what stays visible to HQ at all times, and what never becomes visible no matter who is looking.
If you support HQ admins or answer their questions about sponsorship, this is the reference for "why can't I see who did that" and "does HQ see a franchisee's numbers."
Where to find it
The sponsorship ledger lives on its own page, separate from the funding controls.
- 1Sign in to
hq.verinode.ai. - 2Open Sponsorship in the HQ sidebar. This loads the full Network IU Economy page at
hq.verinode.ai/sponsorship. - 3To fund the pool or earmark a stipend instead of just reading the history, go to Settings → Sponsorship. That tab holds the two admin actions ("Fund pool" and "Earmark stipend reserve") plus a live summary of current balances; this help article covers the read-only history page those actions feed into.
Note
The Sponsorship page is intentionally read-only. It exists for admins and auditors who want to see everything the pool has ever done, not to take action from. Funding actions only live in Settings → Sponsorship.
What the Network IU Economy page shows
The page opens with the heading Network IU Economy and the subheading: "Every grant, drawdown, refill, and refund the pool has processed. Funding actions live in Settings → Sponsorship."
The hero stats row
Four tiles across the top show the pool's current posture:
| Tile | What it means | |---|---| | Pool balance | IUs currently sitting in the network pool, available to cover franchisee AI calls. Subtitle: "Sponsors franchisee calls." | | Prepaid | IUs purchased outright (a one-time buy rather than a recurring plan). Subtitle: "One-time purchases." | | Stipend reserve | IUs set aside specifically for new-franchisee onboarding grants, separate from the general pool. Subtitle: "Earmarked for onboarding." | | Monthly refill | The recurring amount added to the pool each billing cycle, if the network has an active subscription. Subtitle: "Per recurring period" when a subscription exists, or "No subscription yet" when it doesn't. |
The all-time totals row
Below the hero tiles, four smaller stats show cumulative activity across the network's entire history (not just what fits on this page):
- Pool funded, total IUs ever added to the pool by an admin, shown in green.
- Stipend earmarked, total IUs ever set aside for onboarding stipends, shown in green.
- Drawn by franchisees, total IUs franchisees have drawn from the pool to cover their own AI work, shown in red.
- Onboarding granted, total IUs actually paid out as onboarding stipends to new franchisees, shown in red.
Green marks money flowing into the pool; red marks money flowing out to franchisees. Both are healthy, expected activity, not a warning sign. Sponsorship is designed to be expansionary, not gating: it exists purely to give franchisees more room, never to hold anything back from them.
The ledger table
Underneath, a table headed Ledger (N), where N is the number of rows currently shown, up to the 200 most recent, lists every individual transaction. Columns, left to right:
| Column | What it shows | |---|---| | When | The timestamp the transaction was recorded, in your local time. | | Reason | A plain-language category for the transaction. See the table below for every possible value. | | Bucket | Which pool the transaction touched: Network pool, Prepaid, or Stipend reserve. | | Operator | The franchisee location the transaction is attributed to, if any. Blank or a dash (, ) when the transaction isn't tied to a specific franchisee (for example, an admin funding the pool in general). | | Initiated by | The person (or system process) that triggered the transaction. See the privacy boundary section below for exactly when this is a real name versus a placeholder. | | Delta | The IU amount, in green with a plus sign for anything added, in red with a minus sign for anything drawn or removed. |
The Reason column always shows one of these plain-language labels rather than a raw code:
- Admin funded pool
- Stipend reserve earmark
- Monthly subscription refill
- Stripe purchase
- Onboarding stipend grant
- Franchisee drawdown
- Refund
- Expired IUs
- Admin adjustment
If a transaction type isn't on this list yet, the page falls back to a humanized version of the underlying label rather than showing raw formatting.
Empty state
Before the pool has ever been funded, the ledger section shows this message instead of a table:
"No pool activity yet. Once the pool is funded the first time, every grant, draw and refund shows up here."
The privacy boundary
This is the part worth understanding precisely, because two different columns behave differently and for different reasons.
The Operator column is franchisee location data, and it is never hidden
The Operator column shows a franchisee's location name whenever a transaction is tied to a specific franchisee (a drawdown, an onboarding grant, and so on). This is exactly the kind of network-level fact HQ is meant to see: which location drew IUs, when, and how many. It is never redacted, on any network, for any viewer with access to the page.
What it is not: a franchisee's underlying business data. The Operator column tells you a location drew IUs from the sponsor pool. It does not, and never will, show you that location's jobs, margins, vendor relationships, client records, or any other business detail behind the number. Franchisees own that data. HQ's view stops at the location name and the IU count.
The "Initiated by" column is a teammate identity, and it can be redacted
The Initiated by column names the HQ teammate (or system process) that triggered a transaction, such as who funded the pool or who earmarked a stipend. Unlike the Operator column, this is an identity fact about someone on your own HQ team, and it is redacted under one specific, narrow condition:
The reason: demo and tester networks are sometimes shared by multiple unrelated testers using the same HQ group to try the platform. Without redaction, one tester could see another unrelated tester's real name in the audit trail. The redaction keeps the full record of what happened (the reason, the bucket, the amount, the timing) fully visible to everyone, while hiding only the "who" between people who have no real relationship to each other.
Two things never change because of this rule:
- The network's Account Owner always sees real teammate names, on demo networks and real networks alike, because a genuine audit needs to know who on the team actually took the action.
- On a real, live franchise network (not a demo or tester network), names are never redacted for anyone. This isn't a setting an admin can accidentally leave off; it only ever triggers on demo networks.
Note
This check is fail-open by design. If Verinode can't confirm whether a network is a demo network or whether the viewer is the Account Owner, it defaults to showing real names rather than hiding them. A real franchise's audit trail can never be silently degraded by a backend hiccup; the failure mode always favors more visibility for a paying network, never less.
When a row has no teammate attached at all (for example, an automatic monthly refill), the column shows "System" instead of a person's name. When a teammate is on record but no display name could be resolved, it falls back to the generic label "Admin". Neither of those is the demo-network redaction described above.
What HQ never sees, regardless of any setting
Even outside sponsorship, this is the standing boundary across the whole platform: HQ sees aggregates, rankings, and compliance status across the network. It never sees a single franchisee's private business data. On this page specifically, that means HQ can always see which location drew IUs, how many, when, and why in a categorized sense, but never the work, decisions, jobs, or numbers that location's own IU-funded AI activity was actually about. Franchisees own their data. Verinode surfaces and recommends at the network level; it does not hand HQ a window into any one location's private operations.
How to use this responsibly
- Reviewing the ledger to confirm a stipend reached the franchisee you expected, or that a drawdown lines up with a location's own reported activity, is exactly what this page is for.
- If you see "A teammate" in the "Initiated by" column, that is expected behavior on a demo network, not a data gap. Sign in as the network's Account Owner (or ask them directly) if you genuinely need to know which teammate took the action.
- Don't read the Operator column as a stand-in for that franchisee's performance. It only tells you they participated in a sponsored transaction, nothing about their underlying business.