Spend controls let you delegate gifting to your teammates without giving up financial oversight. This guide walks through enabling them end to end.
#Before you start
You'll need:
- An Admin role on your account (only Admins can turn on spend controls)
- Your sales rep to set a fulfillment credit limit if you don't have one yet
- A sense of how you want to delegate — by team, by user, or by campaign
You can skip spend controls if your account has one or two senders and a single annual budget. Everything still works without any caps configured.
#Your fulfillment credit limit (always-on)
This isn't a customer setup step — it's a fact about your account. Your sales rep sets your fulfillment credit limit; it isn't something you configure. We're calling it out first so you understand what's already enforced before you decide what optional caps to layer on top.
It's not a budget — it's a credit decision. Specifically, it's how much in-flight (allocated but not yet invoiced) shipping and fulfillment work your account can carry at once. Product cost is excluded because it's paid as inventory separately.
Two important properties:
- It does not reset on a calendar. It's a continuous capacity number.
- Your in-flight exposure naturally drops as orders move to invoiced through the regular monthly invoice cycle.
The fulfillment credit limit is always enforced when positive — independent of any customer setting. You can see your current limit, exposure, and remaining headroom on the Spend Controls page in Settings.
The remaining steps below are the optional customer-set caps you can layer on top.
#Step 1 — Assign roles to your teammates
Three roles, hierarchical and inclusive:
- Admin — sets account-wide policy, edits any cap, turns spend controls on or off
- Manager — manages their own team only (members, caps, team-assigned campaigns)
- Sender — sends from campaigns they have access to
A Manager is also a Sender; an Admin is also a Manager and a Sender. Hierarchy isn't exclusion.
Assign roles from Settings → Users. Newly invited users default to Admin so they can manage their own account immediately — demote to Manager or Sender from the same Users page if you want to limit what a given teammate can do.
#Step 2 — Create teams (optional)
Teams group users for shared budgets and campaign-scoped access. Skip this step entirely if you only have a few senders.
From Settings → Teams, create a team, pick a Manager, and add initial members. The Manager will be able to edit the team's caps and members from then on.
#Step 3 — Set spend and link caps
You can set caps at three levels:
- Per-user — a cap on each individual sender, with their own period (monthly, quarterly, annual, or lifetime)
- Per-team — a shared cap across all team members, with the same period choices
- Per-campaign — total budget, total invite links, links per sender, and an optional per-recipient cap that overrides the account-wide annual
All caps are optional. Leave a layer blank if you don't want that constraint.
#Step 4 — Turn spend controls on
From the Spend Controls page (Admin only), flip the spend-controls toggle. Merch will refuse the flip if your current in-flight exposure already exceeds your fulfillment credit limit — fix that first by waiting for invoicing or by asking your sales rep about a higher limit.
Once enabled, Merch evaluates every new order against your caps and your fulfillment credit limit.
#What happens when a cap is hit
The order is parked on credit hold. The recipient sees no error — their tracking page renders normally. Your Spend Controls page shows the held queue with the reason that fired. Your options:
- Raise the relevant cap (immediately retries held orders)
- Wait for the period to reset (team and user caps)
- Pay outstanding invoices (frees up fulfillment headroom)
- Override the specific order with a captured reason (audit-trailed)
#FAQs
Will recipients see a "cap exceeded" error? No. Merch holds the order silently — the recipient's experience is always successful. Only Admins (and the sender) see the held queue.
Can I configure caps before turning spend controls on? Yes. Caps are advisory until controls are turned on. We recommend configuring caps first, watching usage for a week or two, then turning enforcement on.
What's the difference between the credit limit and a cap? The fulfillment credit limit is a single continuous capacity number for the entire account — your in-flight exposure ceiling. Caps are optional, layered constraints on specific scopes (campaign, team, user, recipient). The fulfillment credit limit always applies; caps only apply if you set them.
Does an Admin escape their own cap? No. Roles are inclusive, not exclusive. Admins are subject to the same per-user cap as anyone else when sending.
What if I want to turn it back off? Turn off the toggle from the Spend Controls page. Held orders don't auto-release — they remain held until you raise limits or override them.