The franchise budget:
what each store really gets.

The customer doesn't know which pot paid for the ad they saw. The franchisee does, and so does the ACCC. Keeping the two pots separate on paper is what makes the whole budget easy to defend.

• The fund is a shared pool with legal rules: a separate account, an annual statement and an audit unless contributors vote it out.
• Local spend is the franchisee's own money. Some agreements set a minimum; many networks never check it was spent.

Before anyone argues about splits, read what the network has already promised. Item 15 of the disclosure document covers each fund and has to set out how much the franchisee contributes, whether others pay a different rate, the kinds of expenses it can meet, and whether the franchisor must spend part of it for that franchisee's business. It also has to say whether the franchisor or an associate supplies goods or services the fund pays for.

That last point catches networks out. If head office's own agency or a related company does the fund's creative, it has to be disclosed. And if item 15 says the franchisor doesn't have to spend for each franchisee, there's no guaranteed local share. The ACCC is plain about it: paying into a marketing fund doesn't mean your business must be promoted with fund money. Unless the disclosure document says otherwise, a local share is a choice head office makes, not a right.

So the budget conversation has two parts. What the Code and the agreement allow, which is fixed. And what's smart, which is up to you.

Put in your network's numbers. The calculator shows what the fund raises in a year, where it goes, and what each store gets back in its own area each month. The starting numbers are made up. Nothing is sent anywhere.

There's no rule, and anyone who quotes you the right percentage is guessing. The trade-off is simple, though. National brand work pays across every store, but slowly, and you can't point to which store it helped. Local work pays one store at a time and shows up faster in calls and bookings, but only if each store's share is big enough to do something.

That second point is where most splits fall over. Divide a modest fund between 40 stores and each gets a small monthly amount. In Google Ads terms, a campaign's daily budget is the monthly figure divided by 30.4, because Google won't charge more than 30.4 times the average daily budget in a month. On Facebook and Instagram, Meta says an ad set usually needs about 50 optimisation events in a week to finish learning. A few dollars a day per store reaches neither.

When the per-store figure is too small, pool it. Run one regional campaign for the Central Coast stores, one for the Hunter, one for western Sydney, with each store's location showing in the ads. You lose a little control per store and gain a campaign that actually works.

Local spend is where networks get least value, mostly because nobody looks at it. If the agreement asks each store to spend a share of sales on local marketing, ask for a one-line monthly record: what, where, how much, what came of it. Not to police franchisees, but because the best ideas in a network usually start in one store, and head office can't copy what it can't see.

Give franchisees a menu, too. A local Google Ads top-up run in head office's account, a Meta ad set in the regional campaign, a sponsorship pack, a letterbox drop template. It's easier to spend well when the options are ready to go. The local area marketing page covers who should run what.

The Code requires an annual fund statement with meaningful information about receipts and expenses, including the share of income spent on running and auditing the fund. That's the minimum. A monthly one-page report per store, showing what was spent in its area and what it produced, does more for trust than any statement.

It also makes the year-end statement easy. If every dollar is already tagged by channel, month and area, the statement writes itself, and you're not reconstructing it four months later against the Code deadlines.