In two lines: in the Planner you define how much you'll invest per platform and campaign, and by linking each campaign to the real one you see the spend against what you planned. It's your investment plan and your budget control in one place.

What is a media plan in MB Suite?

A media plan is your advertising budget for a period: what you'll invest, on which platforms, and how it's distributed. In MB Suite the plan isn't just a spreadsheet: the spend from your platforms syncs into it and the plan becomes your control dashboard — how much you've invested, how much is left, and whether you're going at the right pace.

How detailed the plan is, is your call: when you create it you choose its mode. By campaign — the default and what this article walks through — plans campaign by campaign and links each one to the real campaign. By platform plans one budget per platform, and By account a single total for the period; in both, the spend comes from the ad account itself and there's nothing to link. See Plan modes: by campaign, by platform, or by account.

How do I create my first plan?

Go to Paid Media > Planner and click New Plan.
Choose the Plan mode. By campaign comes preselected and is the one described here; if you'd rather budget per platform or with a single total, see Plan modes: by campaign, by platform, or by account. The mode can't be changed later.
Fill in the plan details: Plan name — use something clear, for example the month ("January 2026"). Period — the start and end date the plan covers. Currency — the currency you work the budget in. Notes — optional, for the brief, the strategy, or the objectives.
If you already have a structure you repeat every month, choose it in From template (optional) to start with the campaigns pre-loaded.
Click Create Plan.

The plan starts as a Draft. When it's ready, activate it so it counts as your current plan for the period.

How do I load the campaigns and their budget?

Inside the plan, click New campaign and define, for each one: the name, the Platform (Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, or other), the Budget, and the dates.

Repeat for each campaign you'll run. The sum of the budgets gives you the total planned investment for the period.

If you already have your plan built in a spreadsheet, don't load it by hand: use Import from CSV to upload all the campaigns at once.

How do I see actual spend against what I planned?

Open media plan: total budget, invested, remaining, investment per platform with pacing, and campaign table with the Pacing column

This is the Planner's real value. Loading budgets is half of it; the other half is bringing in the actual spend from your platforms to compare it.

Link each plan campaign to its real campaign: when editing a campaign use Link real campaign, or link several at once with Link campaigns.
Use Sync costs to bring in the most recent actual investment from each platform.

From there, each campaign shows its budget, its actual cost, and the balance, and the plan calculates the total invested for the period.

To link and sync, that campaign's platform must be connected as a data source. It's connected from Settings > Integrations. Without that connection, the plan only keeps the amounts you loaded by hand, with no actual spend.

Can I choose which columns the table shows?

Yes. Every role reads the plan differently: whoever owns the budget looks at the balance, whoever optimizes day to day looks at the pace. In the plan's toolbar, Columns opens the manager where you turn each column on or off and drag them into the order you want. Campaign is always visible (you can still move it), and Reset brings back the product's default layout.

The layout is saved to your user, not to the plan: it travels with you to every workspace and account you open, and to any device you sign in from. It's your personal view — it doesn't change what your teammates see.

Three columns come turned off, ready for when you need them:

Planned/day — the campaign's budget divided by its publication days, counting the first day and the last: what you'd need to spend each day to land exactly at 100% of the budget. It's the plan's even pace, and it doesn't move with spend.
Needed/day — the balance divided by the days remaining: what you need to spend each day from today on to close the budget on time. Unlike the planned daily, this one moves with what you've already spent. It shows zero when the budget is already used up or overspent, and "—" when the campaign is over and there's no day left to spend on.
Days remaining — the publication days remaining, counting today and the last day. A campaign that hasn't started yet shows its full flight, and one that already ended shows zero.

All three use the campaign's own dates, or the plan's period if the campaign doesn't have its own, and both dailies show "—" on a row with no budget loaded. When the table is showing the Original budget (the view available when the plan has carryover), both are calculated on that amount, just like Budget and Balance. And Download CSV includes all three whenever you have them visible — in the file they always come from the current budget, like the rest of the export.

The two dailies answer different questions and are best read side by side: Planned/day is the plan and never moves, Needed/day is what today demands. As long as the campaign spends at the expected pace both show the same number, and what pulls them apart is the drift: if Needed/day sits above, the campaign is behind; if it sits below, it has already overspent.

A plan shared with the client (read-only link or portal) has no column manager: it always shows the product's default columns. So arranging your view never changes what a client sees. Inside the app the manager works the same in the three plan modes — a by-platform or by-account plan uses this very table.

To send the table over WhatsApp or paste it into a deck, Screenshot in the toolbar copies it as an image to your clipboard. Full screenshot takes it as you see it; Budget only hides everything that comes from spend — Cost, Balance, Pacing and Needed/day — for when you want to show the plan's budget without showing the investment.

How do I carry an unused balance to next month? (Carryover)

When a period ends you rarely spend exactly what you planned: some campaigns come in under budget and some over. With carryover you don't lose that difference — the leftover (or the overspend) carries into the next plan so its budget starts from the real balance, not from zero. Enable it with Enable carryover in the plan settings, and MB Suite keeps a Carryover history so you can see, month to month, what was carried, from which plan, and how it was redistributed across campaigns.

Carryover needs an up-to-date cost sync to compute the final balance: run Sync costs before closing the period. When you duplicate a plan, the copy doesn't bring the original's spend or comments, or the carryover applied to it: it uses each campaign's original budget, and its balance is free to be carried over like any other plan's. It works in the three plan modes, and also between modes: the balance of a by-platform plan can carry into a by-campaign one.

Each plan can be sent by email or downloaded as a PDF, and there's a record of who you sent it to in the Send History. It's the tidy way to show a client what their budget is being invested in. When you send it, you choose the address it goes out from in the From field; which addresses appear there, and which brand the email carries, is explained in Configure your sending domain.

You can also ask MIA to do the heavy lifting: create a plan, add a whole set of campaigns at once, redistribute the budget across them, or analyze the pacing of your active plans — just describe what you need.

Still have questions?

Ask MIA, the MB Suite AI assistant: open it with the MB AI button (⌘J) in the top bar. MIA knows the section you're in, so you can ask it about what you see on screen — and it can also answer how-to questions about using MB Suite.

Build your media plan and budget with the Planner