Phases and envelopes

Two rows sit under every campaign Tempio plans budget for. An envelope is the most the workspace is willing to run that campaign at per day. Phases are dated windows that scale it: a launch at the full envelope, a hold at a fraction once the launch offer is spent, a closing push near the end, and after the last phase ends, nothing.

Together they say the same thing a good promo calendar says: budget follows marketability. Several campaigns run at once, staggered so one is always hot, and when the sum of what they want is more than the workspace will spend in a day, the hot ones are funded first. The allocator is what does that funding; this page is the two numbers it reads.

The envelope

An envelope is not the campaign's daily budget. The daily budget is what the platform is running today; the envelope is what the workspace is willing to run at peak, and conflating the two would make the allocator's input its own output.

Only an owner or an admin sets one, from the campaign's peek on the timeline. Envelopes are money, so they are a person's act — the same rule that keeps guardrail overrides in settings. Everyone can read them, and so can an agent; no agent sets one.

An envelope above the account's resolved daily cap is refused, with the cap in the refusal. A ceiling above the guardrail would not be a ceiling. A plan item's envelope is in the plan's currency and is checked against the account's at materialization, exactly as budgets are.

Setting and clearing an envelope is audited with the old and the new number on the row.

A phase

Phases on one target may not overlap; the write refuses an overlap rather than letting two multipliers claim the same day. Any number of them is fine, and gaps are fine: a day no phase covers plans at the whole envelope, because the flight is what says when a campaign runs and the phases say how hard.

The ceiling of 300 % is deliberate. Three times the envelope is already an aggressive closing push, and past that the number being wrong costs more than the flexibility is worth.

Materializing a plan copies each item's phases onto the campaign it becomes, dates unchanged, at the moment the draft applies — so a campaign arrives already carrying the shape its plan gave it.

A three-phase launch, in numbers

An account bills in AUD, and its resolved daily cap is A$500.00. One campaign, Autumn Drop, runs 1–31 March with an envelope of A$400.00 a day — under the cap, so the envelope is accepted.

What that produces:

• 1–7 March. The launch wants the whole envelope, A$400.00, which is inside the A$500.00 account cap. It is funded at A$400.00.
• 8–21 March. The hold wants A$160.00 a day. The offer is spent and the campaign is ticking over; the A$240.00 a day it is not using is available to whatever else is hot.
• 22–31 March. The closing push wants 160 % of the envelope — A$640.00. The account cap binds: the most that account may run in a day is A$500.00, so the campaign is funded at A$500.00 and the report names the cap as the reason. Nothing raises a ceiling to meet a multiplier.
• 1 April onward. Every phase has ended, so the campaign wants nothing and the allocator proposes no budget for it.

Whole-flight, the campaign was planned at A$2,800.00 + A$2,240.00 + A$6,400.00 = A$11,440.00, and funded at A$2,800.00 + A$2,240.00 + A$5,000.00 = A$10,040.00 once the cap is applied. Pacing measures the campaign against the planned figure — the envelope times the multiplier — which is why a campaign the cap has been throttling reads as behind, which is exactly what it is.

Add a second campaign whose closing window overlaps this one and the workspace cap starts to bind as well. The order in which the two are funded is the allocator's.

What phases do not do

A phase does not start or stop a campaign. The flight says when a campaign runs; a phase says what it is worth per day while it runs. A phase whose multiplier is 0 plans nothing for those days, and a budget of zero is a pause — a person's act at the gate, not a budget move.

Over MCP

list_phases answers one campaign or plan item, earliest first. upsert_phase adds one, or edits one in place when given its id; delete_phase removes one and leaves the rest alone. list_envelopes reads the envelopes set on the campaigns or plan items you name.

The writes take the draft scope and write planning rows only: they create no change request, because they change what Tempio plans rather than what a platform is running. They are audited all the same.

There is no capability that sets an envelope: an envelope is money, and money is a person's act in the app. The MCP reference has the whole surface, and MCP keys has the scopes.