Deal phases and statuses

Both commitment and endeavor deals move through a series of phases, with statuses that reflect each stage of the deal's life cycle. These statuses capture both the decisions made by participants and real-time information about whether a deal is active, pending acceptance, or has completed the flight.

Here's what you need to know about deal phases and statuses:

There are two sets of status types, dealNegotiationStatus and dealStatus, used to represent deal phases.
- The dealNegotiationStatus value represents the buying party's decision.
- The dealStatus value represents the activity of the deal, such as whether it's live or awaiting action from either party.
You cannot revise rejected deals.
The buying party manages deals in the pre-flight phase.
You can pause or resume endeavors at any time. You cannot pause commitment deals.
You can cancel a commitment deal only if the buying party is at fault.

Phase transition diagram

The core flow of a high quality and healthy deal has the buying party accept the deal proposal, then target the deals, and continue to monitor the deals until the end of the flight. The following diagram shows the transition of statuses during each phase across the deal life cycle from negotiation to post-flight.

The following table lists the different phases of the deal life cycle and how the statuses transition from one phase to another.

Phase	Description
Negotiation	Every deal starts in the negotiation phase, where you send a deal proposal to a buying party. For details, see Deal negotiation status values.
Pre-flight	Accepted deals enter the pre-flight phase and use a different status to reflect what's required from the buying party for a deal to be active.
In-flight	The Trade Desk Active monitors active deals to suggest improvement when pacing behind their spend goals.
Post-Flight	All deals past the flight date have a status of completed, expired, or canceled.

NOTE: You can revise a deal in any phase of its life cycle.

The following sections provide additional details on the available workflows and status changes in each phase.

Negotiation

All deals start in the negotiation phase. For details, see Initiate and negotiate deals. Here's what happens in this phase:

You send an initial draft of the deal proposal to the buying party for review, which sets the deal negotiation status to PROPOSED. For details, see Deal negotiation status values.
The deal status remains set to PENDING_ACCEPTANCE until the deal negotiation status changes to ACCEPTED or REJECTED.
Both parties negotiate terms related to their inventory, restrictions, and promises. The buying party can provide feedback through deal notes to explain their decision to accept or reject. You can follow these notes to implement deal revisions for acceptance.
After the buying party accepts the deal, it enters the pre-flight phase and the negotiation status is ACCEPTED.
When a deal negotiation is REJECTED, the deal status becomes CANCELED and it enters a terminal state where you cannot make revisions and must create a new deal.

Pre-flight

NOTE: As a selling party, you don't have control over the pre-flight phase.

After the buying party accepts a proposed deal, the deal enters the pre-flight phase. In this phase, the buying party might need to adjust their configurations to send bids for a deal. To check if the buying party is ready to spend, you can query for the deal status. For details, see Deal status values.

In-flight

Accepted deals with active spend enter the in-flight phase. During this phase, The Trade Desk monitors the health of the deal and gives you and the buying party options to gain more value from your deals.

Here's what happens in this phase:

The deal status changes to LIVE to reflect that the deal has entered into its in-flight phase.
The Trade Desk collects bid request data to determine if both parties are meeting the conditions and promises outlined in the deal terms.
Deals with a media spend goal that are underpacing can benefit from having one or more Contributing deals added to their primary deal.
If a commitment deal is underpacing, and you have enabled a deal expansion, the buying party can opt into buying a wider inventory selection. For details, see Manage commitment deal performance.
If deal performance doesn't improve after attempted remediation, cancellation (for commitments) or pausing (for endeavors) might be advisable.
To improve monitoring multiple deals, you can group deals together as upfronts for reporting. For details, see Group deals with upfronts.

Post-Flight

The flight date listed in the deal terms determines whether a deal has reached the post-flight phase. In the post-flight phase, the deal updates the deal status to reflect the negotiation result.

Here's what happens in this phase:

If the deal negotiation status was ACCEPTED at any point, the deal status is COMPLETED.
If the deal negotiation has never received a response from the buying party, the deal status is EXPIRED.
If deal negotiation status is REJECTED, the deal status is CANCELED when it ends.
If a commitment deal is CANCELED, the deal status remains as CANCELED when it ends.

TIP: To keep your deals organized, we recommend removing your deals that have reached the post-flight phase. For details, see Manage deals in Post-Flight phase.