Plan-to-Reconcile

Money committed to paid media is planned, spent, watched while the flights run, and then matched against what actually ran. A run starts when an objective arrives with an approved budget behind it, when a targeting need is raised, when approved creative has to be built into the ad platforms, when a live line crosses a pacing or a cost threshold, or when a media period closes on the finance calendar. The processes here split the money across channels and commit the plan at a version, build an audience list from a written rule and clear it against the consent record before it leaves the organization, cut the creative to every placement's specification and check every ad before it serves, test one element of the running creative against variants of it, move committed money between live lines, audit where the ads actually appeared when somebody raises a concern, and set the invoices, the platform delivery figures and the department's own order record beside each other one line at a time. Finance decides the lines that never settle and signs the spend figure for the period, and no report anywhere carries a spend number finance did not sign. Nothing here decides how much marketing has to spend in total, because that was settled before any of these runs opened.