Newsletter Sponsor & Ad-Slot Tracker

The problem this kills

Selling sponsorships in a newsletter starts simple and gets dangerous fast. One slot per issue is easy to track in your head. Then you sell a top banner and a mid-issue slot in the same send, plus a takeover three weeks out, plus a make-good for a sponsor whose creative arrived late. Now it lives in a spreadsheet that three people edit, and one Tuesday you discover you sold the same primary slot in the same issue to two different sponsors. Both already got an invoice. One is going to be furious.

Then there's the creative scramble: the issue ships Thursday, it's Wednesday night, and you're not sure which sponsors actually sent their ad copy and images. You're DMing people, digging through your inbox, and hoping nothing ships blank. Meanwhile nobody can tell you, at a glance, how much revenue is actually booked for next month's issues.

The spreadsheet has no guardrails. It can't stop a double-booking, it can't chase a missing ad, it has no record of who approved an oversell exception, and it quietly drifts out of sync the moment two people touch it.

This Implementation Plan replaces that with a small, private internal tool that knows your slot inventory, refuses to sell the same slot twice, tracks creative status against each issue's deadline, requires a manager to approve every booking, and keeps a permanent record of who did what.

What you'll build

A login-protected web app for your newsletter / media ops team that:

• Holds your issue calendar - each issue's date and the ad slots it offers (e.g., top banner, primary, secondary, classifieds).
• Imports your sponsor deals (sponsor, issue/date, slot, rate, creative status) from a CSV or Google Sheet.
• Checks slot availability the moment a deal is entered and flags any overlap - the same slot in the same issue can't be sold twice.
• Tracks creative-received status and flags missing creative before each issue's deadline so nothing ships blank.
• Routes every booking (and every oversell/overlap exception) through a manager approval gate before the slot is committed.
• On approval, commits the slot and sends the sponsor a confirmation email.
• Computes booked revenue per issue and exports a clean fulfillment + revenue CSV in the exact columns your finance or ad-ops system expects.

It's built to fit your newsletter, because the very first thing it does is interview you about how your inventory and deals actually work.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), and it builds the tool with you step by step. No prior coding needed.

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before writing a line of code, the plan has the agent ask about your current process, your spreadsheets and tools, the exact names of your ad slots and issues, your typical and peak deal volumes, your pricing and approval rules, your creative deadline rules, and your real edge cases (make-goods, partial takeovers, recurring sponsors). Then it reads back a short tailored spec and waits for your thumbs-up. You get a tool shaped to your newsletter - not a generic template.
• A clear definition of done so you know exactly what "finished" looks like.
• Every build step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt you paste into the agent.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the whole thing today using CSV/Google Sheet imports and a clean CSV export - no integration with your email platform or ad server required.
• A verification checklist so you can prove it works before anyone relies on it.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. Every runbookify plan builds in the controls that make a real revenue tool safe to use:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own issues, slots, and sponsors.
• A complete audit trail - who entered a deal, who flagged an overlap, who approved or rejected it, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool checks availability and drafts the booking, but the slot is never committed and the sponsor is never sent a confirmation until a manager reviews and approves. The AI drafts; a person commits.
• Duplicate guards keyed on issue + slot, so a single slot can never be sold twice.

Who it's for

Newsletter operators and media-side marketing ops people monetizing their send - anyone selling ad slots and sponsorships out of a spreadsheet who is tired of the double-booking near-misses and the creative-deadline fire drill. If you can keep a clean spreadsheet, you can run this tool - and you'll finally have a defensible, auditable record of every booking and every dollar of booked revenue.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.