Visibility
Nobody Knows What Is Left
The budget lives in one person’s workbook. A partner asks what they can still spend, and the answer takes two days and a reconciliation.
Create a fund pool, allocate it to the partners earning it, then work requests and claims in two clean queues. Every allocation carries a live balance: allocated, requested, claimed, and remaining, current for both sides at all times.
Market development funds exist to buy pipeline. Run on a spreadsheet and an inbox, they mostly buy arguments about what was agreed and what is left.
The budget lives in one person’s workbook. A partner asks what they can still spend, and the answer takes two days and a reconciliation.
A partner asks for funds, the thread grows, someone agrees on a call. A quarter later nobody can say who approved what, or on what terms.
Receipts land in an inbox with no link to the activity that earned them. Finance rebuilds the whole picture from scratch at quarter end.
Committed against claimed against remaining, per pool and per partner, with both pending queues in view. Your partner sees the same numbers you do.
Four moves take an MDF program from a budget line to a defensible number. Every one of them updates the same live balance.
A fund pool holds an amount, a currency, and a period. Allocate slices of it to the partners who will spend it, and each allocation gets its own balance meter from the moment it exists.
A partner opens their allocation, sees exactly what is free, and submits a request describing the planned activity and the amount. It lands in your pending queue with the balance already checked.
Once the activity has run, the partner submits a claim with proof of spend against the request that funded it. You settle or deny it in the claims queue, and the balance moves the moment you do.
The spend dashboard rolls it up across pools and partners: what you have committed, what has actually been claimed, and what is still sitting unused with the year running out. Export the whole thing as CSV when finance asks.
Most MDF programs run on a spreadsheet next to an inbox. Airstride treats pools, allocations, requests, and claims as records with rules, so the balance on screen is the one you can defend at quarter end.
Tie accrual to your partner tiers. When a partner moves up, their MDF allocation accrues automatically, so budget follows the partners actually producing.
Budget guards sit in front of every write. A pool cannot be allocated past its ceiling and a claim cannot settle above what was approved, so the meter is never wrong.
Requests and claims move through a strict state machine with an approver, a timestamp, and a reason on each decision. Quarter-end review takes minutes instead of a week.
MDF sits beside the deals, tiers, and activity for the same partner. You can see what a partner spent and what it produced without exporting anything.
MDF picks up where tiering leaves off, then hands the results to payments and analytics without anyone re-keying a number.
The questions channel and finance teams ask before they move market development funds off a spreadsheet. Something else on your mind?
Talk to SalesA spreadsheet holds numbers. This holds records with rules. Each pool carries its own amount, currency, and period, each allocation carries a live balance, and every request and claim moves through a strict state machine with an approver and a reason. Partners submit against their own balance instead of emailing you, and the total is always current rather than reconciled once a quarter.
See how pools, allocations, requests, and claims run in one place, with a balance your partners and your finance team both trust.