About Marketing Development Funds (MDF)

Audrey

April 17, 2026 14:57

Advice

Submit a request to your Unifyr One team if you're interested in implementing this feature. It's very flexible: there are many configuration options that your team can use to build your MDF system to align with your business processes.

Overview

MDF, or Marketing Development Funds, are funds that you make available to partners to support promotional efforts on your behalf. There are many ways that MDF can be used, including sponsorship of events, reimbursement of the hosting of training sessions or webinars, and many other promotional costs.

With Unifyr One MDF, you create funds that are time-bound and have a defined value. Once the budget is set up by the supplier, and funds are allocated to partners, the partners can then spend the funds on campaign offerings configured by the supplier, or on off-platform marketing activities with 3rd party providers. Offerings can be limited to certain funds, giving the supplier additional control of the program.

General MDF Options

Suppliers can choose between a currency-based MDF model and a points-based MDF model. If using points, all MDF will be represented in whole numbers as points (Pts) rather than in monetary value.
Integration with 3rd party MDF Management systems, such as Vistex or Ansira, can be implemented.
MDF supports an approval workflow. Your Unifyr One team can either designate approvers in Unifyr One (if you have a single approval level) or integrate your system with a 3rd party MDF Management tool. If you select the second option, Unifyr One will wait until it receives an all-clear message from the other system when it completes its workflow before proceeding.
If your system has Marketplace enabled, orders with 3rd party providers can be financed with MDF in Unifyr One

MDF Funds

Unifyr One supports the use of funds to track MDF usage, where a supplier defines the funds and amounts in Unifyr One Admin, and makes them available to partners in the portal. The partners make requests to the supplier to call off amounts from their allocated fund(s).

Note

Funds must be enabled on your system. Submit a request to your Unifyr One team if you want to use them. The MDF pre-approval/claim/approval process works on an adhoc transaction basis if funds are not implemented. For more information about transactions, see Manage Transactions.

Suppliers can allocate funds to their partners, and both parties can track their usage.
Funds can be allocated on a per-partner basis, or uploaded in bulk to multiple accounts simultaneously.
Funds can be categorized into Fund Types, and (optionally) you can select a Default Fund Type to be used when uploading/assigning funds.

Claims and Pre-approvals

Workflows for processing claims and pre-approvals are supported.
Transactions can be attached to a partner's assigned MDF funds, or handled independently.

Before You Begin

If you are using an external solution to manage your MDF program, you will need to have your Unifyr One team set this up for you.

Setting up your MDF Program

Before partners can request MDF sponsorship, you must set up your MDF program. These are some tasks that you may need to carry out, once your Unifyr One team has enabled the required MDF features. What you need to do depends on how you want your MDF system to work.

Your Unifyr One team can give you guidance on which of these tasks are required:

Work with your Unifyr One team to integrate Unifyr One with your MDF Management platform.
Add MDF pages or functionality to your partner portal.
- Virtual wallet icon - partners can click to view and manage their MDF transactions
  
  This is done in your MDF Settings - for more information, see Managing MDF Settings.
- Marketing Transactions feature page
- Marketing Funds feature page (if Funds are enabled)
- Marketplace feature bundle (if the Marketplace is enabled)
For more information about adding pages to your portal, see Adding Feature Pages to the Partner Portal.
If you're working with claims and pre-approvals, configure these items as required:
- Decide your workflow with your Unifyr One team
- [Optional] Decide if you want to list transaction processing to pre-approvals or claims only
  
  Both transaction types are enabled by default. Submit a request to your Unifyr One team if you to implement restrictions.
- Define any custom MDF data fields you want to use - for more information, see Adding Custom MDF Fields.
- Define the MDF transaction statuses you want to use. For more information, see Customizing MDF Transaction Statuses.
- Configure the Claim/Pre-approval forms to present to partners in the portal and to your users in Unifyr One Admin. For more information, see Form Configuration.
- Set up notification recipients for events in the claim/pre-approval workflow - both supplier and partner recipients.
- Decide what columns of information you want your Transactions listing to show. For more information, see Configuring your View of the Transactions list.
For more information, see Transactions.
Set up your Fund Types, defining the name, amount, and dates for which they will be available to partners. This allows you to use different types of fund for different purposes, or for different recipients. For more information, see Create and Manage Fund Types.
Work with your Unifyr One team to specify individual fund approvers and any additional rules for the approvals.
Assign funds to partners, either singly or in bulk. For more information, see Managing a Partner's MDF Funds and Uploading MDF Fund Information.
Set up recipients of notifications about fund activity - both supplier and partner recipients. For more information, see Supplier Notifications and About Automations.

Training

Learn more with our training courses:

You will be prompted to log into your CustomerONE account to access the links.