01 · Contracts & renewals
This is the paper-trail heart of the platform: where you upload vendor quotes for expert benchmarking, keep your signed agreements, and watch every expiry, notice deadline, and price-list change so none of them catches you out. It is also where you work a live deal to a close, from setting a mandate through to signature. If a screen touches a contract, a vendor, or a renewal date, it lives in this chapter.
Analyst Benchmark
The related records strip states whether this vendor's signed agreement is on the ledger; when none exists it says so and offers to add one so the notice date is tracked.
Analyst Benchmark holds the vendor quotes and offers you put in front of an analyst, from upload to delivered report. Signed paper lives on the agreement ledger, and a whole folder at once goes to Contracts, which the empty state now links directly.
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you can move between them without going back out, and the entry you are standing on is marked. Escape closes the window.
Vendor quotes and contracts you have submitted for benchmarking. Each one moves along a path: Uploaded, In review, Benchmarked, then Delivered when your report is ready.
*In plain words: the tracker for everything you sent to the analysts, and the door to each finished report.*
When to reach for this
- "Where is my benchmark?" answered by the status pill and the expected delivery date.
- The report landed and you want to read it: the Report tab is on the proposal's own page.
- A quote deserves the expert treatment rather than an instant read.
On the screen
- Status pills — where each proposal sits in the review pipeline. Every step talks to you: an alert and an email when an analyst picks the proposal up (with the expected delivery date), when the benchmark is built and moves into final quality review, and when the report is delivered. If a benchmark ever slips past the promised turnaround, you get one proactive email owning the miss with a revised delivery date. Tune these under Settings › Notifications (Benchmark status updates and Report delivered).
- Proposal page — open a row to see its status path, the files you attached, and, once delivered, the benchmark report. While a proposal is anywhere before Delivered, the page refreshes itself within half a minute of a status change, so you never need to reload; delivery announces itself with a toast that opens the Report tab.
- Indexed for Vera — each file on the proposal page states whether Vera can read it yet. A readable file indexes itself within minutes of upload; a scanned PDF shows Being transcribed while its pages are read image by image, then flips to indexed for Vera, and the uploader gets an in-app note the moment it becomes readable (Uploads finished processing under Settings › Notifications). Until a document is indexed, Vera cannot read, search, or cite it.
- Benchmark request card — an upload normally enters the analyst queue by itself. When your plan's benchmark allowance is used up it cannot, and the proposal page says so plainly: the card states your usage (for example 4 of 4 requests this month) and resolves it in place. An organization owner adds a benchmark credit ($5,000 for one full analyst benchmark, billed by invoice, no card) in a dialog; the request lands on our desk as a support ticket, our team confirms and invoices it, and the credit is added to your account. A teammate who is not an owner asks their owner in one click; the owner gets the request with a link back to the proposal. While a credit request is in flight the card shows it, with a link to follow the ticket under Support.
- AI review — on a proposal page you can run an AI redline scan of the vendor PDF that flags risky clauses with quotes from the document.
- Filters and views — the facet row narrows the list by status, vendor, recency, tag, or owner, and the pipeline band's segments are the same filters one click big. A combination you keep returning to saves as a named chip in the Views row beside the facets; see Saved views.
How to use it
- Upload a proposal: vendor, contract type, your question, and the files (PDF or DOCX).
- Open a proposal to track its status, or wait for the emails; every stage change reaches you either way.
- Read the report once it is delivered.
- About 30 days after delivery, answer the What happened? question, from the one-touch email or the card on the Report tab. A won reduction, with its annual figure, lands in your realized savings on Portfolio; if the contract has no stored annual value the card asks for the pre-reduction baseline so the saving can be reconciled against invoices.
If something looks wrong
- The proposal reads Saved, not queued: your plan's benchmark allowance is used up, and the page resolves it in place with a benchmark credit; see the card described above.
- The status emails never arrive: check the Benchmark status updates toggle under Notifications and Troubleshooting.
Related: Upload a proposal · Delivered reports
Upload a proposal
One drop zone sends vendor quotes and contracts to our analysts for benchmarking. Drop one file or twenty; each document is read as it lands, its details fill in as editable chips, and you confirm the whole batch once. You will be emailed when each report is ready.
*In plain words: drop the paper, check the chips, confirm once.*
A worked example. Drop a renewal quote like the sample Contoso Analytics one and watch the chips fill: vendor Contoso Analytics, 120 seats, $450 per seat, $54,000 annual value, the term dates, and, tellingly, no uplift cap, because the quote names none. A missing or low-confidence value shades gold or red; that is your cue to check the paper, and the benchmark focus box is where you tell the analysts what you actually want answered ("the quote carries no uplift cap; what does that cost us?").
On the screen
- The drop zone — drop PDF or DOCX files, browse, choose a whole folder, or paste files from the clipboard. Every file is verified by its contents (not just its name) the moment it lands, and stored privately: your organization and our analysts only.
- File cards and chips — vendor, title, category, annual value, currency, seats, term dates, and uplift cap fill in per file, shaded by how confident the read is: plain for high confidence, gold for worth a glance, red for please check, blue for values you set yourself. Click any chip to correct it; the AI pass never overwrites your edits.
- Discount band — once the vendor is known, the card shows the discount band buyers like you land with that vendor at your deal size, with sample sizes, so you know the stakes before you submit.
- Notes and benchmark focus — optional per file: notes for our analysts and what you want benchmarked, with a one-click starter template matched to the proposal category.
How to use it
- Drop your files (up to 20 at a time). Each card starts reading immediately: rules first, then an AI pass that upgrades anything you have not edited.
- Check the chips, correct anything gold or red, and add your benchmark focus.
- Confirm once (Ctrl+Enter also works). A batch shows a progress bar while it submits, and each card ends as Queued with a link to its proposal page.
- Track progress afterwards on the Analyst Benchmark list.
Tips
- Files are limited to PDF and DOCX and capped at 40 MB each. Files upload straight from your browser to storage.
- Your edits survive a stray navigation: chip corrections, notes, and the benchmark focus are restored when you re-add the same files in the same browser session.
- If your plan's benchmark allowance is used up, the upload still lands but ends as Saved, not queued instead of Queued. Open the proposal page to fix it in place; see Analyst Benchmark below.
Related: Analyst Benchmark
Contracts
*In plain words: drop your whole contract folder and get back a filed, judged estate.*
This screen was called Your Archive, then Contracts, and it lived at /archive. In August 2026 it folded into the Contract Management Portal, so the estate has one door rather than two. Everything it did is still here, one room along:
| What you came for | Where it is now |
|---|---|
| The vendor ledger, your agreements, the renewals | Contract Management Portal › Contracts |
| The review queue and the read log | Contract Management Portal › Index |
| The file explorer and Add documents | Contract Management Portal › Files |
| The estate benchmark | Contract Management Portal › Market |
| The post-scan money moves | The What next close at the foot of every room |
| The intake brief | The What next close, or the link in your scan notification |
Old links and bookmarks to /archive still work and land in the matching room.
Full documentation: The Contract Management Portal in Chapter 18, with a section for each of the ten rooms.
Related: The Contract Management Portal, Market: where every agreement stands, Renewal calendar
Compare contracts
A saved comparison says when the paper moved: on the contract record and on your Comparisons shelf it shows the date it ran and names the compared document that has a newer version since, with a Compare again link that reopens this desk with the same two contracts selected. Nothing re-runs on its own.
Side-by-side document comparison with an AI difference scan, in its own window. Opening Compare contracts from anywhere, the contracts header, a record's compare card, the drop chooser, lands you straight in a Mica window rather than a workspace page: the titlebar carries a rail toggle, the theme switch, Maximize, and Close (which returns you to Home), a frosted papers rail sits on the left, and the desk renders on a solid pane. The result opens with a verdict band (terms compared, which side is stronger where, watch-outs), then one card per term showing both sides' language with the stronger position highlighted, a Your options card laying out your next steps, and an amber watch-out panel closing the read.
On the screen
- The papers rail — every contract on file, on the frosted panel. Press one for the first slot and another for the second; press an assigned paper to clear it, and with both slots held a third press swaps the second paper. On phones, and whenever you hide the rail, the two dropdowns in the picker carry the same choosing, and the slot cards under them always name what is on the desk.
- The window foot — the desk's own status line: how many contracts are on file, the comparisons left on your plan, and where results save.
- Document panes — the two documents side by side.
- A paper sent from the chat — dropping a contract onto any screen and choosing Compare it with another contract lands here. This desk holds contracts rather than files, so the paper is filed to your contracts on the way in, the page says so while it happens, and the desk then opens with it already picked on the left; you choose the side to hold it against. It is the only one of the chooser's answers that adds a record, and the button says so before you press it. Filing this way spends no benchmark from your allowance and puts no renewal on your calendar, and the vendor and contract type fill themselves in from the document. If it is the only contract you have, the desk says the paper is filed and waiting rather than telling you to upload two.
- Difference scan — the AI's read of what changed and what it means commercially.
- Your options — two to four concrete next steps drawn from the scan, numbered, with exactly one marked Recommended, so the read ends in a decision rather than a table. The same block appears on the compare card each contract's record page keeps, told from that contract's own perspective.
- Saved automatically — every completed scan files itself on both contract records and on the Comparisons shelf of your Saved page; the green note under the result confirms it.
- What next — a finished comparison closes with a What next panel: seed a case or a renewal playbook on the weaker contract, put an Ask Vera question on the sharpest difference, or copy the verdict for a chat thread.
How to use it
- Press two papers in the rail, or pick them in the dropdowns, and run the scan. While it reads, a progress bar counts toward done and names each step as it happens; a full read usually lands inside a minute.
- Read the verdict and pick from Your options. There is no save step: the finished scan is already on both contract records and on the Comparisons shelf of your Saved page, so you can reopen the pair any time.
Tips
- Use this to check a renewal quote against last year's paper, or a redlined draft against the version you sent. For a year-over-year read on the same vendor, see the Time machine tool.
Related: Saved
Vendors
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you move between them without going back out, and Escape closes the window.
Every vendor across your proposals and agreements, one page per vendor, so you can see your whole relationship in one place.
*In plain words: the whole relationship with one vendor, on one page.*
When to reach for this
- Before any vendor conversation: contracts, benchmarks, market intel, and notes in one read.
- Taking over a colleague's book: this page per vendor is most of the handover (the recipe).
- Opening the case file when the meeting deserves the full executive-brief treatment.
On the screen
- Your position — the masthead states the estate in one sentence under a gold rule: how many vendors you hold, their stated annual value, how many renew inside 90 days, and how many are priced above the market median.
- The briefing band — three reads before the rows. Where the money is draws your spend concentration as one bar across the top five vendors, with the share each holds. The renewal runway plots every tracked renewal across the next twelve months, soonest first, and counts the vendors with no renewal date on file. Needs attention names up to four profiles worth opening today, each with the reason: renewing inside the window, priced above market, or carrying proposals with no stated value.
- The register — vendors grouped by the role they play in your estate: anchor vendors (the top five by stated value), the working portfolio, and the profiles with no stated value. Each row carries the vendor, a one line position statement, a verdict in plain colors, the annual value, and the renewal countdown. Choosing a sort (spend, renewal urgency, recently active) flattens the groups into one ranked list.
- Vendor page — open a vendor for its contracts, benchmarks, market intel, and notes.
- Open the case — a navy band under the related records opens the vendor as a case file: a full screen file of numbered executive brief documents in a grouped left rail, paged with the arrow keys or the rail, with a read meter tracking your progress and Esc to close. Up to six documents build from what the vendor's record holds: your agreements ledger, the pricing band at your deal size, the vendor's terms and conduct intel, a negotiation angles brief fitted to your footprint, and a closing What now sheet whose every move runs on your live records. Drafts open in your own inbox, copies go to your clipboard, and nothing ever sends from a case. Several records across the platform open the same way; each section below says what its case holds.
How to use it
- Open a vendor to see everything you have with them.
- Run an instant benchmark for a vendor from here.
Watch
The watchtower opens as its own window with six rooms on the number keys, and one search that crosses all of them.
- The tower — every published change on a vendor you actually hold, priced at your own seat counts, over a strip showing a year of the whole tracked market.
- The change — one move argued in full: the before and after prices, what changed and why, what to do about it, and a lever that prices the move on any seat count you set.
- Your bill — what you are billed against what you are entitled to against what the market pays, checked daily, ranked by what each finding costs a month.
- The price book — which published lists are watched, how often, and what is still waiting on an analyst read before it reaches you.
- The market — the same watch on vendors outside your estate, where a repricing shows up before it reaches your renewal, plus the email opt-in and the vendor follow picker.
- The record — one vendor's whole published history as a seismograph and a table.
Three pages sit beneath the window for the work that needs a form: the leak board, the price list check, and the archive by vendor. The old addresses (/vendors/watch for Terms watch, /spend/watch for Billing watch) redirect, so old links, bookmarks, and emails keep working.
The tower room carries the same navy band it always did: Open the workroom raises the watchtower file, a four document case that reads the whole tower for the last 90 days. The watch brief states the period in tiles and one narrative, the change ledger lists every change on your vendors with both published prices and your exposure, On your paper folds the period per vendor with the renewal windows to act, and What now carries the stakeholder memo, the copy moves, and the rooms. ⚡ What now and ✦ Ask Vera, grounded on the file, ride beside every paper.
Terms watch
Every change to a tracked vendor's published price list, diffed on each refresh and priced at your own seat counts. This is the vendor side of the watch: what a vendor moved, and what that move would cost you at renewal. Every change is kept, so you can read a vendor's full price history any time.
*In plain words: when a vendor moves its published prices, you find out, priced at your own seat counts.*
When to reach for this
- Setting up the watch on your top vendors, once, in the week the estate lands.
- A renewal is inside a year: the vendor's recent moves are your negotiation file.
- A price rise just landed mid-term: the change's case file carries the response play.
Your position sits in the masthead: price changes on your vendors in the last 90 days, vendors tracked and how many are in your estate, your annualized exposure at the next renewals, and the biggest single move in the window. The vendor follow switch and the other standing watches sit in the column beside the strips.
On the screen
- The watchtower workroom — the navy band above the floor opens the watchtower file described at the top of this section: the whole period across Terms, Billing, and the check, as four executive papers with the moves and Ask Vera docked beside them.
- The floor toolbar — one instrument row over the strips: scope the board to your vendors, the tracked market, or both; cut it to increases, decreases, new SKUs, or retirements; and read the last 90 days or the full year. The count at the right restates what the filter left, so a narrowed board never reads as a quiet market.
- Email me when price lists change — a switch in the side column turns on the price-change digest; nothing is sent until you turn it on, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe that turns off only this email. Below it, one chip per vendor company (Microsoft covers Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365 in a single chip; Oracle and Google merge the same way): pick the vendors you care about, or choose All tracked vendors to hear about every tracked change. The list here and on the Price list check tab are the same roster, so the two tabs always agree.
- Your vendors — a seismograph strip per vendor you hold: increases strike upward in brick, decreases downward in green, new SKUs in gold.
- Open the change workroom — selecting a change shows a second navy band under the diff panel; it opens that one change as a five document workroom: the cover sheet, the change itself with both published list entries side by side, an impact brief priced at your own seat counts, a response sheet weighing the grandfathering, renewal, and acceptance options, and a What now sheet. ⚡ What now drafts five letters from the change itself, the grandfathering request, the claim on a new list price, a clarification request on a new SKU, a continuity request on a retired SKU, and the internal note to stakeholders, then copies the change summary or the one line version and opens your renewals or the full price history. Both published prices are quoted rather than derived. ✦ Ask Vera answers from this change and your own exposure to it; if you do not hold the vendor, the room says so and treats the move as market intelligence rather than exposure.
- Market watch — tracked vendors outside your estate. Changes here are context, not exposure, because nothing below touches a contract you hold.
- Also watching for you — cross-links to the Billing tab and to standing answers that changed.
How to use it
- Read your vendors first: any strip with a recent brick strike is a price rise heading for a renewal you hold.
- Use the switch to have price-list changes emailed to you, and follow the vendors you want to hear about.
- Open a change to see the old and new price, the delta, and what it costs at your seat counts.
- Switch to the Billing tab to see whether your invoices already reflect a move.
If something looks wrong
- The digest emails are not arriving: the switch here is the source of truth, and nothing sends until it is on; Troubleshooting covers the delivery cases.
- Your vendor's strip is missing: following is per vendor company, so check the chip roster on the Price list check tab, and request the vendor from its card if it is not tracked yet.
Related: Archive by vendor · Billing watch · Research Agent
Terms watch archive by vendor
Every published price-list change Terms Watch has ever detected, kept and re-sorted by vendor. It opens with the read: how many vendors have moved, increases against cuts, and which vendor moves its list most. The index lists every vendor whose price list has moved, with how many changes it has, a breakdown of increases, cuts, new SKUs, and retirements, and when it last moved. Open a vendor to read its full history, newest first: each change shows the old and new price, the delta, and the grounded analyst note (what changed, why it likely changed, and the one action to take before renewal).
How to use it
- Press Archive by vendor in the watchtower's pill row, from any of its rooms.
- Scan the index (most-changed vendors first) or find the vendor you are about to renew.
- Open the vendor to read its full price history and the note attached to each change.
Billing watch
Every day, per vendor per SKU: what you are billed against what you are entitled to against what the market pays. Drift arrives with its corrective draft attached, and a correction only counts once later invoices confirm it. This is the customer side of the same seismograph as the Terms tab.
On the screen
- The masthead — the headline number lives in the navy masthead: how much a month is leaking, across how many vendors, with live bleed, open findings, vendors leaking, and corrections landed. Recompute sits beside it.
- The watchtower workroom — the navy band above the board opens the shared watchtower file (see the top of this section), which reads the billing drift beside the period's price-list changes.
- Leak board — a row per leaking vendor with the SKUs where billed, entitled, and market prices disagree.
- The side column — how the watch reads (billed against entitled against market), entitlements waiting for your confirmation, and the rest of the tower: the Terms tab, invoice disputes, proven corrections, and standing answers that changed.
How to use it
- Read the verdict band for the live monthly bleed.
- Open a leaking vendor to see the SKU-level findings and the corrective draft attached to each.
- If the board is empty, confirm entitlements from a contract or connect a license source so the daily check has something to price against.
Tips
- An approved correction is proven or disproven against later invoices, and the verified saving lands in realized savings on Portfolio; mischarge disputes are tracked on Invoices.
Related: Terms watch
Price list check
The verification machine on one screen. The book of published list prices refreshes weekly, an automated check re-reads each vendor's own public pricing page and compares it against the anchors on file, walking the whole roster inside every week, and an analyst confirms any detected change before it is published to the Terms tab. This tab shows all of it live, and doubles as the place you choose what you are notified about.
On the screen
- The watchtower workroom — the navy band above the desk opens the shared watchtower file (see the top of this section).
- The sweep band — the dark panel at the top of the desk states the live numbers: price lists under watch, published prices on file, checks against vendor pages in the last 7 days, and detections currently with an analyst. Beneath them, a heartbeat marks every automated check this week: green verified clean, gold a detected change, red a page that could not be read and retries.
- Notification bar — the email switch, the All tracked vendors chip, and your follow count. The roster below is the picker: the bell on each row follows or unfollows that vendor and saves instantly, no separate save step. Following is one chip per vendor company, so all the Microsoft lists ride one follow.
- Latest verified changes — the most recent analyst-confirmed changes with their deltas, linking to the Terms tab where each is priced at your seat counts.
- Search and lenses — find a vendor by name, or cut the roster to your vendors, lists with changes, stale prices, or lists needing attention.
- The roster — grouped by category, a row per price list: the vendors it covers, how many SKUs are on file, a freshness bar for the published prices, the list's recent check history, and the latest result. A gold dot marks vendors in your estate.
- The drawer — open any row for the full detail: every anchor's list price, unit, publication date, and confidence, a price-history trend per SKU, the latest check's verdict for each anchor (matches the page, change detected, or not printed publicly) with a link to the vendor's own pricing page.
- The side column — how the check works in three steps (the book refreshes, the check reads the vendor's page, an analyst verifies), and Request a vendor: buying from someone we do not track? Ask and the list joins the roster with its own weekly check.
How to use it
- Read the sweep band: if detections sit with an analyst, a price move may be coming to Terms soon.
- Turn on the email switch, then either keep All tracked vendors or click bells to follow just the vendors you hold.
- Use the Your vendors lens to confirm your estate is covered; anything green was recently re-verified against the vendor's own page.
- Open a row before a renewal to read the vendor's current anchors and their history, straight from the book our analysts maintain.
Related: Terms watch · Archive by vendor
Research Agent
The Research Agent opens as its own application window, not as a page inside the Market Desk. Every door leads to the same window: the rail entry, the desk tab, a link in an email, a typed address. Closing it returns you to Home.
Every Monday the agent researches the week's enterprise software news for pricing and licensing changes, anything that moves costs or negotiating position, and files this wire. It runs five sweeps in parallel, one per beat (price moves; licensing, packaging and product terms; audits, support and end of life; M&A and earnings; the regulatory and notice calendar), opens and reads the consequential articles in full rather than working from headlines, runs a completeness check that closes anything the sweeps missed, and remembers recent weeks so it reports what is new rather than repeating itself. It also reads the platform's own evidence, price list changes from Terms watch, price index moves and fresh research, alongside the web. Each item links to the article it came from, and an item whose figures were checked against the research and whose source link answered carries a green verified at source mark. Between briefings, a daily flash check watches for changes too big to wait for Monday; when one breaks, the item joins the current week's briefing the same day with an Added stamp naming the day it landed. A story that develops over several weeks reads as one thread: a continuing item notes which week of the story this is. It is short on quiet weeks and longer only when something major breaks; items on vendors you hold are marked throughout.
The menu row sits under the title bar: File, The wall, View, Collaborate, Alerts, Help, the way a desktop application carries them. Alt opens them, and every item prints its key beside it. Nothing lives only in a menu; each one is a second door to something the rooms already do.
- File — print this week, open it in a new tab, copy a link to it, read this week's brief, close the window.
- The wall — every finding on file, search every week, only the vendors you hold, the three things a finding can ask of you, and the six most covered vendors, each with its count.
- View — jump to any of the four rooms, sort the wall, clear the filter, maximize, dark mode.
- Collaborate — send this week to a colleague, copy a link, print or save as PDF.
- Alerts — what you are subscribed to, ticked, with a press opening the vendors room where the switches live. A menu never changes a notification setting on its own.
- Help — what this agent does, the keyboard shortcuts, and what the agent is.
The four rooms sit in the rail on the left, and keys 1 to 4 move between them.
Room 1 · The wall is where the window opens: every finding the agent has ever filed, hung as a gallery, so one vendor's whole run reads in one place rather than a week at a time.
- The stage — the photograph across the top of the room, with the week's loudest finding standing on it: what it is, one line of what it means for you, Read the finding, and The ninety second read which opens this week's brief. Along its foot, four figures: findings on file, vendors covered, weeks filed, and how many land on paper you hold.
- The rail — the filters, on the left, each row counting what it holds. The wall narrows to every finding, this week, or the vendors you hold paper with. What it asks of you narrows to Act this week, Watch, or For the file. Vendors lists every vendor the agent has covered, most covered first, with a gold yours tag on the ones you hold. Weeks lists every week it has filed. The other libraries opens the Benchmark, Renewal, and Research libraries, because a vendor that just repriced is usually a benchmark or a renewal question next.
- The search and sort row — a search field reading every finding's vendor, headline, detail, what it means for you, its source and its week, and a sort: newest first, what it asks of you, biggest move first, or by vendor. The count on the right says how many of the findings are showing.
- What it asks of you — three plates over the wall, one per rank, each fanning the marks of the vendors behind it. Press one to narrow the wall to it.
- The plates — one card per finding: the vendor's own logo, the move its source stated at display size in red when your costs went up and green when they fell, the week it ran in, and a gold your vendor tag where you hold paper. A finding whose source stated no figure names its type rather than showing a zero. Under the picture: the type, the headline, one line of what it means, the rank, and the date it takes effect.
- Reading one — press a plate and the finding opens in place: its rank and type, the headline with the move beside it, a before and after bar wherever the source stated both prices, What you should know about it as a numbered list, then The detail as bullets, then the source line linking the article the agent actually read. The ← and → keys page through the shelf exactly as you filtered it, and the foot offers the rest of that week, the vendor's full archive, and the next finding.
Room 2 · This week is the wire as a document, opened from the stage or with key 2.
- The 90 second read — the week's finding in one sentence, then the stake in one line (how many items need a decision, how many land on paper you hold, the biggest stated move, and how many changes already carry a date), then the executive summary as a numbered list, one point per sentence. Nothing is dropped and nothing is re-summarised; the agent's own sentences are simply set as a list.
- The ledger — every item as one row: vendor, what changed, the move as a percentage, when it takes effect, and your read. Rows are ordered by what they ask of you rather than by when they were published: Act this week first, then Watch, then For the file. The rank is worked out from the item's own figures, its effective date, and whether it lands on a vendor you hold, so it is the same for everyone reading the same week. Rows on vendors you hold carry a gold edge and a yours tag. Press any row to read that finding on the wall.
- The calendar — a strip of the week's dated changes in the order they land, drawn only for changes whose source stated an effective date.
- The findings — one card per item, split into pricing and licensing first, then product and market context, each section in the same rank order as the ledger. The conclusion leads: the card opens with its rank, its type and its estate mark, then the headline, then a before and after bar wherever the source stated both prices, then What you should know about it as a numbered list, and only then The detail as bullets, the evidence behind the read. The source line at the foot links the article the agent actually read.
- What to do this week — the week's moves, numbered, first one first.
- Bottom line — the call in one sentence, with the reasoning as points under it.
Room 3 · What it does explains the agent itself.
- The pipeline — the Monday pass drawn as five stages: sweep, read, verify, match, file.
- What it is looking for — the six signals as a checklist. Anything failing all six is left out.
- What lands on your desk, and when — a table of every output, where it appears and on what cadence.
- What it will not do — the limits, numbered and stated plainly: it never invents a figure, it reads public reporting rather than your contracts, and it is short on quiet weeks.
Room 4 · Your vendors is where the weekly email, the follow list, and the per vendor alert live. It saves in three steps and one press.
- Step one, the Monday email — a switch, off by default. Nothing is sent until you turn it on, and every email carries a one click unsubscribe that turns off only this email.
- Step two, the follow list — a search field over the 50 researched vendors, so you find your own stack by typing rather than by reading every name. Searching narrows what is shown and never changes what you follow. On your own paper lifts the vendors the agent found on contracts in this workspace to the top, followable in one press. Below it, eight groups sort the rest into the buying conversations they belong to (platform and ERP, cloud and infrastructure, data center and virtualization, data and analytics, security and identity, developer and AI, collaboration and content, business applications and services). Each group follows or clears as a set and counts how many of its vendors you follow.
- Step three, tell me when a vendor I follow moves — two switches, both off until you turn them on. Notify me in the workspace posts a notification the moment a week is filed carrying one of your vendors, naming the vendor and what changed, opening straight to that week. Email me as well sends the same alert to your inbox with a one click off link. This is not the Monday email: the briefing is the whole wire on a schedule, and this fires only when a vendor you follow actually moved. Follow no vendors and the alert has nothing to watch, which the room says rather than letting you switch on silence.
- The save bar — follows you down the list and says what is unsaved, then states what is on once it is saved. Every vendor is researched whether or not you follow it; following moves its items to the top of your briefing and your email, and decides what the alert watches.
Sending a week to a colleague. Send this week, on the row under the figures or in the Collaborate menu, opens a short sheet: pick somebody from your workspace, say what you want them to do, send. They get a real task on their desk dated a week out, a notification, and an email, each linking back to the same week you were reading. Only members of your own workspace are listed; the window does not mint a public link.
How to use it
- Read the wall, starting with the plates marked your vendor and the ones ranked Act this week.
- Chase one vendor: press its name in the left rail and read its whole run of findings, newest first, then open its full archive from the foot of any finding.
- Read the week itself with The ninety second read on the stage, or key 2, and press any ledger row to open the finding behind it.
- Press Your vendors, search for the vendors you hold, follow them, turn on the Monday email, and turn on the alert if you want to hear between briefings. Save.
- Send anything somebody else owns straight to them with Send this week.
- Open What it does if you want to know exactly what the agent reads and what it will not claim.
Tips
- The title bar carries its own light and dark switch, because the window covers the top bar's usual one. It flips the same account theme everywhere.
- Keys: 1 to 4 for the rooms, / to search every filed week, ← and → to page through findings while reading one, ? for the shortcut list, Alt for the menus, Esc to close the finding, then the filter, then the window.
- A finding you are reading is written into the address, so the link you copy opens that finding rather than the wall in front of it.
- Your weekly emails arrive as one Monday brief: the vendor market wire (this report), renewals coming up, watchtower changes, and savings and wins in a single send. Turn any section off while keeping the rest under Settings › Notifications, where the per vendor alert also appears as Vendor wire alerts.
Related: Archive by vendor · Terms watch
Research Agent archive by vendor
Every weekly update the agent has ever filed, kept and re-sorted by vendor so nothing drops off. Updates that belong to the same developing story fold into one story card, newest week first, with a chip counting the weeks, so a saga fought over a quarter reads as one narrative. It opens with the read: how many vendors carry a major market-moving update, how many touch pricing, and which vendor the desk keeps writing about. The index lists every vendor the agent has covered, with how many updates it has and when it was last mentioned; a gold dot marks a vendor with a major update on record. Open a vendor to read its full history: every price move, licensing change, and market shift on it, newest first, each linking back to the week it ran in.
Commission the desk sits beside the archive: gold chips that turn what is on file into a written document rather than leaving you to act on a feed. A renewal strategy brief on the vendor the desk covers most, offered only where your workspace actually holds a contract for that vendor; a Monday briefing that states how many notice deadlines fall inside 45 days; and a closing question that opens Vera on the same subject. Each commission writes a full document to your Deliverables and keeps writing even if you close the dialog. The same rail rides the price watch archive, where the chips are the renewal strategy brief on the vendor with the most published price moves and talking points for the call on that vendor.
How to use it
- Open the Research Agent, go to the Archive room, and press Browse by vendor.
- Scan the index (most-covered vendors first) or find the vendor you are about to renew.
- Open the vendor to read its timeline, and click any Week of eyebrow to jump to the full weekly brief it came from.
- Press a Commission the desk chip to turn the coverage into a document you can forward.
Agreements
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you move between them without going back out, and Escape closes the window.
The ledger is signed paper only, one row per vendor. The full document estate is in Contracts, and a quote you want priced against the market goes to Analyst Benchmark.
Signed contracts you are tracking for spend and renewals, worked as a ledger and an inspector. The table groups every vendor folder by what binds you first; selecting a row opens that folder in full beside the table. Set the expiry and notice period once, and the platform watches the deadlines for you.
*In plain words: the ledger of what you signed, with the dates watched so windows never shut silently.*
Inside the Contract Management Portal the ledger is one dense grid over the whole estate, the same table grammar as the Uploader's run. A filter and three lenses sit across the top, All paper, In motion (anything in a notice window or renewing) and Uncapped auto renew (the paper that renews itself with no ceiling on the increase). Beside them the figures: the annual run rate, what is due inside twelve months, what auto renews with no cap, how many agreements are in motion, and the value of what you are currently looking at, which moves as you filter. Then the table itself: the family, its governing paper, its state, the annual value, the renewal date, the notice by date and the uplift cap. Press a column heading to sort by family, by annual value or by consequence, and press it again to flip. A notice date inside thirty days wears a red edge and red text, one inside four months wears gold, and an auto renew with no cap reads none in red. A click selects a row, a double click opens that agreement's record, and Enter opens the selected row.
Uploading happens in the Enterprise Uploader, never here. The ledger reads your paper; the Uploader is the one door that takes it in, checks it, and keeps it staged until you sign it off.
When to reach for this
- Filing a newly signed contract, the day it is signed, while the dates are at hand.
- Checking what reaches renewal inside 90 days and what vendors are asking above your caps.
- Auditing inherited agreements for the two fields that matter: expiry and notice.
A worked example. The sample Northwind CRM agreement carries $142,800 a year, an expiry with a 60 day notice period, and a 7 percent uplift cap. The vendor's renewal proposal on file asks $162,792, a 14 percent increase, which is exactly the kind of gap the masthead's "asking above your caps" figure counts and Anomalies flags. One ledger row, set up once, is what makes that breach visible without anyone rereading the contract.
On the screen
- The Contract Management Portal frame — the ledger is a room of the one Contract Management Portal application: a Mica window with ten room tabs across the top, Files, Index, Contracts, Search, Market, Workflow, Sign, Renewals, Estate and Reports, switched with keys 1 to 0, and a menubar of nine menus (File, Edit, View, Paper, Renewals, Tools, Team, Learn and Help), each opened with Alt and its letter. The status bar at the foot states the estate's figures: the papers filed, the vendors, the value under management a year, and how many agreements sit in a notice window.
- The ledger — one row per vendor, grouped by urgency: notice window open, past renewal, renews inside 90 days, later this cycle, and no date yet. Each group states its count and annual value, and the runway column shows how much of the final year has run with the notice deadline ticked on it.
- The inspector — select a row and the panel beside the table works that folder in full: the term drawn as a timeline, the editable terms, the uplift verdict against your cap, and up to five documents. On a narrow screen it stacks under the table. Days remaining are counted on your organization timezone's calendar day, the same one deadlines and alerts use, which owners set under Renewals.
- Chips, search and views — filter to the notice windows, the next 90 days, past renewals or undated folders in one press, search the ledger by vendor, or switch to the Runway tab to see every renewal drawn on a timeline. You can track up to forty vendor agreements.
- The workroom — a band above the ledger opens the case file: the position on a cover sheet, a docket of every folder that needs a decision and why, and a What now sheet of real moves drafted from your own folders: serve notice where the window is open, agree terms in writing where the deadline has passed, challenge proposals standing above their uplift caps, and benchmark the largest agreement with no renewal quote on file. Letters open as editable drafts and send from your own mail client.
- What next — the page closes with the same moves as a module, so the ledger never dead-ends.
How to use it
- Add an agreement with Add vendor or Add with AI: vendor, expiry date, notice period, and the signed files.
- Press the In notice chip and work the top row in the inspector: confirm the dates, enter the vendor's proposed price against your cap, and file the paper.
- Open the workroom's What now sheet and run the top move; the notice letter is usually it.
- See them sorted by deadline on Renewals.
If something looks wrong
- An agreement never alerts: check it carries both an expiry date and a notice period; without both there is no window to watch. And remember the alerts themselves are opt-in under Notifications.
- You are out of room: the ledger tracks up to 40 vendor agreements with 5 files each. Past that scale, the estate belongs in Contracts or Enterprise Uploader.
Related: Renewals
Deals
A deal is one negotiation held in one place: the papers on the table, what you are trying to win, the standing instructions you want followed, and how strictly a conversation inside it is bound to those papers.
*In plain words: the folder for a single negotiation, and the switch that stops Vera answering it from the rest of your estate.*
When to reach for this
- A renewal is coming and you want every question about it answered from that paper, not the whole workspace.
- Several people are working the same negotiation and the instructions should be written down once.
- You want a brief you can forward that says what the deal is, what is on the table, and where it stands.
On the screen
- The stake, at the top — how many papers are on the table, their combined annual value, and the nearest notice deadline. The deadline is the expiry pulled back by the notice window, which is the date that actually matters: after it the renewal is automatic whatever the expiry says. Only tracked agreements carry a value and a window, so a deal made of uploaded contracts alone reads Not on file rather than a confident zero.
- How this deal answers — the scope, as three short rows: what your papers do, what happens to anything outside them, and what stays untouched. Press Soft or Hard and the rows rewrite to the behaviour you just chose, before you have asked anything.
- Soft scope — the papers are the subject, so "the contract" and "this deal" mean them. Vera still looks wider when a question genuinely goes wider, a comparison against another vendor for instance, and says when she has.
- Hard scope — her lookups are held to the deal's vendors. A question that names nothing is narrowed to them and the answer says so, and one that names a vendor outside the deal gets a plain reason instead of an answer drawn from the rest of your estate. The market, the web and the research library are never narrowed: a deal says which of your papers are in play, not what the market is allowed to say. A deal with nothing pinned holds to nothing, and the page says so.
- On the table — the papers themselves. Add an uploaded contract or a tracked agreement from the chips beside the heading; the bin takes one off. What is pinned here is what a conversation on this deal reads first. Add a file under the list takes anything else the deal turns on, a pricing workbook, a photographed rate card, a text note: the file is kept with the deal, marked File in the list, and Vera reads it through her document search on every question scoped to this deal.
- The brief — what the negotiation is for, and the standing instructions Vera holds to on every conversation in the deal. They steer the work and never license stating a figure she cannot ground.
- Ask Vera on this deal — opens a conversation already carrying the deal, so the scope applies from the first question rather than after you explain it.
- What next — the moves this deal offers, including the brief you can copy and paste into a note.
How to use it
- Press New deal, name it after the negotiation, and say in one line what you are trying to win.
- Put the papers on the table: the agreement you are renewing, the proposal that arrived last week, or both.
- Write the standing instructions you would give a colleague working it, then Save the brief.
- Set the scope. Soft while you are still exploring, hard once the papers are the whole conversation.
- Press Ask Vera on this deal and work it. Every answer reads those papers first.
If something looks wrong
- The combined annual value reads Not on file: only tracked agreements carry one. Pin the agreement rather than the uploaded contract, or add the figure on the agreement itself.
- A hard scope is not narrowing anything: check that a paper is actually pinned. With nothing on the table there is nothing to hold to, and the page says so under the scope rows.
- Vera answers about a vendor you did not expect: the scope is soft. Switch it to hard and save.
Related: Agreements · Vera conversations
The agreement file
One agreement's whole record on one page: what it is worth, where it stands, every version it has been through, and every actor who touched it. It is the same page whether the agreement came from your ledger or from a proposal you uploaded. The Agreement Command console that used to list these files folded into the Contract Management Portal on 25 August 2026; the file itself is unchanged and every link to it still works.
*In plain words: everything known about one agreement, and the moves that follow from it.*
On the screen
- The read — the panel at the top right states where this file stands before any table does. It is the first thing to look at.
- Five panes under the header: Overview (the terms, the economics, the state), Documents (what is on file; on a contract backed record the file's name, the View button, a click or a double click opens the paper in the reader, the document analysis window described under the Enterprise Uploader in chapter 0: find, the figures the read lifted, marks on the paper, a question box, and the redline painted on the page), Redline (the marked-up paper and what changed), The watch (the rights you hold and duties you owe on this agreement), and Activity (one timeline every actor writes to, human and Vera alike, including a call about this agreement once you hang up).
- Team discussion — the Activity pane also carries the file's comment thread. Write a comment, mention a teammate with @ and only that person is notified, resolve a thread when it is settled. For a ledger agreement this is the same thread its renewal card shows, so one conversation follows the paper wherever the team reads it.
- The economics read — your discount, the peer range, and where this deal ranks, with the money at stake a year when a decode has priced the movable terms. When there is no market read yet it says so and offers the benchmark rather than inventing a figure.
- The benchmark report — one press composes the full verdict on a page and a half: your discount, what comparable customers at your size are offered, where the deal ranks with the gap priced, the discount curve with your deal placed on it, what protects you and what works against you, and a plain answer to whether you are overpaying. The report saves on the contract as a versioned record inside the platform, opens in its own window, and exports to Word in the same look or to Excel with live sensitivity formulas. Run it again after a renewal and the new version files on top of the old.
- What if they ask for more — the renewal lever, under the economics read. Move the uplift the vendor is asking for and the length of the term, and the cost of the next term moves with it, on your own annual figure. It opens on the forecast's own expected uplift so it agrees with the panel above it, and it shows what compounding actually costs: year two pays the uplift on year one's raised price. Where your paper caps the uplift, it prices what the cap is worth against the ask, so you know what the clause is protecting.
- Move the file — the states an agreement can go to next, for editors. A file moves forward one declared step at a time rather than by free text.
- Version chain — every version of this agreement in order, so a term you remember differently can be checked rather than argued.
- Doors — the surfaces that do the work: talk it through with Vera, the market answer, the ledger, the rights register, the runway, and the vendor page, everything you hold with that vendor on one page.
- The Reading Room — the Redline pane opens full screen: the counterparty's own language beside your position, clause by clause. Edit your language in place and the tracked change renders live as you type, their words struck, yours underlined, exactly what the Word file will carry. Accept, edit, or reject each finding (j and k walk the list), then one press composes the real tracked changes redline into their own DOCX and files it on the version chain under your name.
- The Decoder — on a proposal's file, three doors run Vera's decoder on the stored paper without leaving the room: the contract decode, the MSA Agent, and the SOW Agent. The run happens in the background and the result opens in its own window when it lands; a recent run is reused rather than paid for twice.
- Send it on — Vera drafts a follow up email from the file's own facts, for the vendor, your CFO, your CIO, or a colleague. Edit anything, then copy it or open it straight in your own mail app. Nothing ever sends from the platform.
- The Signing Desk — for records at the Executing station. Open the signing studio is the front door: the stored PDF opens full screen, you name up to ten signers in the order they must sign, drag signature, initials, date signed and text areas onto the pages (each area carries its signer's color), write the note that travels with the request, and send. Every signer receives a personal link and signs in the browser with no account: they type or draw a signature once, every area of theirs fills, text boxes ask for exactly what you labelled them, and out of turn they see who signs before them. Back on the desk, each signer shows their standing by name: sent, opened it but not signed, or signed with the date, so you can see exactly who is holding things up. A live envelope can be reminded (the slowest signer gets a fresh link), re-routed to a different person (the old link dies the moment you do), or voided with a reason that lands on the record; a signer who declines must say why, and the reason reaches you verbatim by email and on the activity trail. When the last signature lands, the areas are stamped into the PDF, a certificate of completion is appended (the chain in order, each signature's time and network address, and the document's fingerprint), the signed copy files on the version chain, the record moves into force, and the fully executed contract goes to every party by email. Orgs that sign on DocuSign or Adobe Acrobat Sign keep those rails on the same desk: connect either under Settings › Integrations and the quick send routes the same signers through the provider instead.
- What next — the close of the page. Every move there runs on this file's own record: decide what to do, work the paper, or see it in context. Copy the position puts the value and the notice deadline on your clipboard as one line for an email.
How to use it
- Read The read panel first, then the economics.
- Move the renewal lever to the uplift you expect to be asked for. That number is what you are negotiating against.
- Take the move that follows from it under What next, and file the state forward when the agreement genuinely moves.
Related: The Contract Management Portal · The call room · Rights register
The watch desk
Route: /agreements/watch · Who sees it: everyone · Reached from: Contract Management, the Watch tab, "Open the watch desk"
Both sides of your paper on one floor: the rights the contract gives you, and the duties it puts on you. Every row is quoted from the document it was read out of, so nothing appears here that cannot be pointed at in the paper.
The desk above is shown on a workspace whose contracts have not been read for rights yet, which is what a new estate looks like. Once the register has run, the panels fill with the rows described below.
On the screen
- The headline states what you are owed, and whether any of it has been claimed.
- Five figures across the top: what is owed to you, what you have recovered, how many rights come round again, how many duties fall due inside 30 days, and when the next window shuts.
- The register, in two tabs. Rights you hold are the concessions you can exercise: a benchmark review, a true down, a price hold, service credits. Duties you owe are what the contract asks of you: a usage report, a true up notification, proof of insurance. Each row carries its deadline, who owns it, and the passage it was read from.
- Rights that repeat carry their schedule, for example "Every year, turn 3". The desk shows the turn you are on now rather than the first one, so a right your contract grants every year stays watched for the whole term instead of lapsing after one use.
- Service credits is the ledger of what a vendor owes you when it misses what it promised. Each credit moves from Owed to you, to Claimed, to Received, or to Not pursued if you decide to let it go.
How to use it
- Open Contract Management, choose the Watch tab, then press Open the watch desk.
- Read the rights first. A row showing days left is still open to you; a row marked late has passed.
- Press a credit's status to move it along the claim. The headline and the three totals move with it, so you can see what claiming is worth before you commit to it.
- Use the Claim button at the top right to move every outstanding credit at once.
Amounts are held in the currency each credit is owed in, and currencies are never added together: a credit is claimed in the currency the contract states it in.
Agreement Studio
One room for the whole life of an agreement. The estate board lists every agreement on your ledger with its renewal posture, and opening a row holds that agreement as six acts over the record the platform already keeps. Where the Agreements workbench edits the terms, the studio reads them as a story: what you signed, what you owe and own, when to act, whether the language still protects you, and whether the price is still right.
*In plain words: click an agreement and its whole situation reads left to right, with the letter you need already drafted.*
On the screen
- Pick up where you were — once you have opened files here, the studio greets you with the five agreements you last worked in, each with what it costs a year, when it renews, and anything needing you. One press reopens that file on all six acts. The five follow your account rather than your browser, so they are the same on any machine, and an agreement you have since deleted simply drops off the list. Open the estate board beside it goes to the whole ledger. A link that names an agreement goes straight there and asks nothing.
- The estate board — one row per agreement: state, annual value, renewal date, and what needs you, with passed notice deadlines and closing windows called out first. Clicking a row opens its room. It is the first thing you see before you have opened anything, and one press away afterwards.
- The empty board — before your first agreement the board offers the two ways to start. Add the first agreement opens the Agreements workbench with its vendor picker ready, and Load the sample portfolio fills the ledger with example agreements so you can walk a room before your own paper arrives. The sample offer appears only while your workspace has never loaded it; remove the sample from the dashboard once your own agreements are in.
- Act 1 · The paper — the signed terms on the ledger, the documents on file, and the doors to the workbench and the agreement file. Talk it through with Vera opens the call room as a conversation about this agreement: she arrives knowing its value, its term and its renewal clock without you setting anything up, and the room offers the conversations already held about this same paper so you can pick one back up rather than start again.
- Act 2 · The watch — the rights you hold and the duties you owe for this vendor, harvested from the contract text, each with its verbatim clause and window. Owners and statuses live on the Rights register.
- Act 3 · The clock — your posture in plain words: window open with the days left to act, or deadline passed. Both notice letters are drafted, the protective notice that keeps every option open, and the renewal terms letter for a deadline already missed. Copy either or open it in your email app; nothing sends from the room.
- Act 4 · The language — the decodes of this vendor's paper, each with its clause count, and the doors to run a new one.
- Act 5 · The money — the uplift check on the ledger's own figures, and the bridge that hands the renewal to the Negotiation Agent with the working deal carried across.
- The estate — where the file sits among the rest, and the moves.
How to use it
- Open the Agreement Studio and read the Needs you column. The row nearest its notice deadline is the one to open first.
- Walk the acts with the arrow keys. The clock act states your posture and holds the letter that fits it.
- Copy the letter, assign the watch items on the rights register, and take the renewal itself to the Negotiation Agent when the numbers need arguing.
Related: Agreements · Rights register · Negotiation Agent
Vera OS (beta)
Vera OS is the autonomous procurement companion: agents that work renewals and deals end to end under mandates you sign, grounded on your VendorBenchmark data. Opening Vera OS lands you directly on the Control Tower in your normal workspace, reading your own estate live; there is no separate landing page and no separate Vera OS menu. Because it runs as its own product alongside the platform, it is documented in full in the technical reference: Vera OS, the autonomous procurement companion.
Related: Renewals
Renewals
The renewal desk opens as a Windows application: a caption, menus, a command bar and a status bar on a mica frame, with a solid page inside it. Nine rooms on the rail and on the number keys read the same book from the same reading of your agreements, so no two of them can disagree about a figure. One of them, File, is the agreement's record, so nothing about a renewal needs a second page. Renewal alerts are opt in: nothing about a renewal emails you until you switch it on under Settings, Notifications.
*In plain words: every agreement on one clock, the case for each beside it, and the one move it needs next in the command bar.*
When to reach for this
- The Monday pass: what shuts next, what it is worth, and the one press that moves it (the desk routine).
- A renewal is close enough to decide: the case states the options and the money on each, not just the date.
- Planning a quarter: the weeks the team will be running six renewals at once, and what commits before the quarter ends.
A worked example. On a book carrying a $2.4M agreement whose notice date passed fifty days ago, the desk opens with that fact in the information bar rather than with a table: the term renewed itself because notice was not served, the next agreement follows in ten days unless notice goes out, and together that is $3.2M a year committed or about to be. Do this now beside the bar is the one press for the first of those. Press 2, drag the date lever to the end of the quarter, and the counts re-derive: three agreements committed by then, one due, one still open. Press 1, pick the agreement with no value, type the figure into the setup card, and the book, the hero and the case re-rank on the spot.
On the screen
- The frame — a 32px caption with the workspace name and the sample or own book badge, the menus (File, Book, View, Team, Learn, Help), a command bar whose green primary is always the one move the selected agreement needs next (set the value, name an owner, serve notice, confirm the term, benchmark it, build the plan), and a status bar with the book's totals, the selection and who is in the workspace.
Ctrl Kopens the command palette,?the key sheet,Esccloses the desk. - The rooms — nine, on the rail and on the number keys
1to9: Today, File, Calendar, Workload, Approaching, Pipeline, Plan, Managed and Record. The badges on the rail count what needs a hand in each.Ctrl Bcollapses the rail to icons,Ctrl \folds the book away,Ctrl Ifolds the inspector. - The hero — an information bar that states the stake in one sentence and is red, amber or green by what it says, Do this now beside it, and four stats: the book, inside the runway, above the market, and what renews itself if ignored. Each stat is a press that filters the book.
- The book — one row per agreement, grouped by consequence: act now, this quarter, on track, each group with its money. The chips above it filter by state, Find in the command bar narrows every room at once, and
jandkwalk the rows. Right click a row for its menu. Drag a row onto a person in Workload or a column in Pipeline. - The case — what is missing first: the value, the notice period, the owner and the paper, each with the control that fixes it, and the count of facts on the record. Then the dates on a term timeline (sourcing start, notice date, today, the quarter close, the term end), the money with the uplift lever and three outcomes (renewing as offered, holding today's price, pricing at the market median), one of them marked the ask, the market card, the moves as a checklist that remembers what you ticked, and the thread, where a note is saved against the agreement for the whole team.
- The market card — answers the three questions when a delivered benchmark exists for the vendor: the discount you hold, what peers at this size land, and where the deal ranks, with the gap in money over the term. With no benchmark it invites one and never guesses.
- File — the selected agreement in full, on key
2or Enter, where the separate record page used to be. The stage is a control: press the next stage and the move is written. The terms carry the hand that edits each of them: the value, the notice period, the auto renewal switch and the uplift cap. The position card shows the forecast at renewal, the should cost target and what it puts on the table, where the deal ranks, and the seat true-down with a one press ask. The paper is uploaded and opened from the room (PDF, Word or Excel, checked on arrival and stored privately). Proposals and the delivered benchmark sit beside the playbook and the checklist, whose steps are tasks with an owner and a due date. The rail carries the engage doors, the autopilot switch, the run, last time and the activity. Watch, Follow, Snooze 14d, the calendar file, Take it to market and Close the cycle sit under the name. - Have Vera run it — on the file, the case intake as a sheet inside the desk. Guided lets you review the strategy, the asks and the opening email before she sends a word; Automated lets her pick the strategy and run the thread on your goal. The vendor contact's email, the target and the walk away are the mandate, and only an organization owner can authorize the launch. The case then opens as the Case tab of the File room, beside the file: the stage, the facts, the first email when it has not gone out, your decision when the vendor made a formal offer (edit and send her counter, or tell her how to answer), the mandate with the approve press, the market position, and the case file with every email both ways. Take over from Vera, hand back, nudge her, the case report and the full deal thread sit on the card.
- Start a renewal — the green primary in the command bar,
Ctrl N, or a contract dropped anywhere on the desk. A four step wizard: the paper (drop or upload a PDF, DOCX or XLSX, pick a contract from the ledger, or enter the terms by hand), the terms (Vera reads the vendor, the term end, the notice period, the value and the uplift cap off a PDF and marks each field she filled), the want (renew as is, lower the cost, expand, or decline, with a note on what she should know), then the review and one press that puts the agreement on the clock with its paper, its owner and its want, and opens the Plan room on it. A wizard abandoned midway leaves nothing on the book. - The inspector — Brief, Vendor, Team, History. Vendor carries the fiscal year end and the nearest quarter close, the negotiator's guide, the research library doors and the vendor's films, which play inside the window. Team hands the renewal to a colleague or invites one. History is the log of every change, note and send.
- Calendar — a runway row per agreement from the day sourcing should start, through the notice date, to the end of the term, with today a fixed line. The tinted part of a bar is lead time already spent; the hatched tail is after the notice date, when the term is committed whatever you decide. Move the date lever and the counts and the commitment curve re-derive for that day.
- Workload — the weeks the team is running the most renewals at once, and the book by owner. A row dragged onto a person changes the owner.
- Approaching — everything on approach on one orbit, sized by spend and coloured by readiness, with the book ranked by money over the time left.
- Pipeline — the four stage columns. The arrows on a card, or a drag between columns, write the stage move, and the toast offers Undo.
- Plan — the project plan for the selected agreement, on the seven phases a renewal takes: decide what it is for (renew as is, lower the cost, expand, or decline), benchmark the deal, review the contract terms, set the negotiation strategy, prepare the talking points, get the internal approval to sign, and sign at the contract office. Each phase knows when it is done from the record and carries the press that does it; the approval is recorded on a sheet with who approved and on what terms. Say what you want at the top and press Have Vera research it: about a minute later the steps she proposes join the phases, dated on the same timeline, and What Vera found carries her advisory on its own tab: the position, the bottom line, key findings with where each comes from, numbered recommendations with their priority (now, before the first call, before signature), an impacts table, and what to watch for. The standing strip states the steps, how many are complete, the next due date and how many steps have an owner. Project plan is a table: every step with its owner (assign anyone on the workspace), its due date, its status (proposed, pending, in progress, complete, rejected) and the step it waits for; press a row for what it achieves, how to prepare, the basis and the links; each row takes comments for the team and a question for Vera, whose answer stays on the step. Read and watch is the reading list the library holds on the vendor, found live: the vendor's own guide from the Renewal library with its posture, meter and window, films and analyst briefings that play inside the desk, recorded sessions and podcast episodes, the negotiator's guide and the playbook, the research library's papers, and the paper on the record, each with Open and a share link; Share the reading list with the team posts the whole list to the agreement's thread. AI avatar puts a seat from the specialist bench on the renewal, from this tab or from the calendar mark on a face on Home's bench: it reads the record, the plan, the advisory, the thread and the library on the vendor, writes its own briefing, answers in its own voice on that renewal alone, and keeps what matters from every conversation. Brief again after the record changes, Forget clears the conversation, Change takes the seat off. Ask VendorBenchmark for help sends the renewal to an analyst with what you need and the facts on the record; the press promises a reply within 24 hours, and the ask goes on the thread. Hover over any part of the plan, the standing strip, the tabs, the columns, the advisory's sections, and it explains itself. The plan copies out as text, Copy the link gives the team a link that opens it, and the ambition (hold the price, price at the median) still prices what the plan is worth in the side cards.
- Managed — which agreements to hand to the Vera AI Team, the mandate the handover carries, and what it recovers. The handover completes on Managed renewals.
- Record — the alert gap first: your alert lead days against the sourcing runway each agreement's size warrants, with a press that closes it. Then the forward book by quarter, what delivered benchmarks say the book is overpaying, and your closed record.
- The sample book — See the sample book on an empty desk fills it with fourteen worked example agreements, ten of them benchmarked, so you can see the desk before your own agreements are on file, the File room included. Nothing in it is your data and nothing in it is saved, alerted on or exported.
How to use it
- Read the information bar. It states what is at stake in the book, not what is on the screen.
- Press Do this now, or pick a row and press the green primary in the command bar: it is always the one move that agreement needs next.
- Fill the setup card for anything the case is missing. A value or a notice period typed there is written to the agreement.
- Work down the moves and tick them off; post what you agreed to the thread.
- Press
2and push the date lever forward to see what commits before the next quarter arrives. - Press Start a renewal, or drop a contract on the desk: check the terms Vera read off the paper, say what you want, and press Start the renewal.
- In the Plan room, approve the steps you keep, put a name and a date on each, set what each waits for, and press Read and watch to share the vendor's briefings, guides and papers with the team before the first call.
If something looks wrong
- The desk is empty: rows come from agreements carrying an expiry date, so an empty desk means missing dates, not a quiet year. See the sample book shows the desk working while you fix that.
- Above the market reads
$0: no benchmark has been delivered for any agreement in the book, so the desk refuses to guess. An instant benchmark or an uploaded proposal is what turns it on. - The primary says Set the value: the agreement carries no annual value, so nothing can be ranked or priced until it does.
- Have Vera research it is greyed out: say what you want first (renew as is, lower the cost, expand, or decline); the plan is researched for the want.
- The research says it could not finish: Vera tries three times before giving up; the room keeps the reason and Try again runs it once more. A vendor with nothing in the library still gets an advisory from the paper and the vendor's habits.
- Start a renewal says the vendor is already on the clock: the book holds one agreement per vendor, so the press reads Add to that vendor and the paper and the want go onto the existing agreement. Its dates stay as they are; change them on the File room if the new paper is the newer one.
- An old bookmark to the clock, density, orbit, insights or playbook room still works: it lands in the room that replaced it. An old link to a renewal record lands in the File room with that agreement open.
Tips
- The layout you leave (the book width, the inspector, compact rows, the collapsed rail) is remembered per workspace. View, Reset the layout puts it back.
- A notice letter or a term confirmation opens in your own mail client with the letter drafted, and the send is logged on the agreement's history.
Related: Renewal calendar · Renewal playbook · Major renewals · Renewal Command
Renewal Command
Every large renewal run as a case, in one window. Renewal Command opens as its own Fluent window over whatever page you are on. The desk shows the whole book: the stake in four tiles, a 120 day runway with every notice and renewal date flagged, and the queue as a dense table. Pressing any renewal turns the left rail into that case's nine rooms. Everything reads from the same renewal book as the classic Renewals page, so a date fixed in either place is the same date in both.
*In plain words: one window where a big renewal gets a plan, a team, a market read and a thread, without leaving the desk.*
When to reach for this
- A renewal is large enough to run as a project, with steps, owners and a deadline, rather than as a row on a list.
- You want the paper, the market read and the negotiation plan in one place before the first vendor call.
- You want a reminder a set number of days before the notice window closes, sent to you and nobody else.
A worked example. A Salesforce agreement at USD 2,340,000 a year renews on 31 October with a 30 day notice window. On the desk its lane shows the notice flag in gold at 1 October. Opening the case, the overview brief states the paper, the clock, the market and the standing in four labeled lines; room 7 lays a 20 step plan backwards from a signature date a week clear of notice; room 6 writes the ask on the case's own figures. Ticking steps moves the phase path on the overview, and the case thread in room 9 is the same conversation the renewals page shows for that agreement.
On the screen
- The desk — four stake tiles (on the book, next notice, benchmarked, needs attention), the 120 day runway, and the queue. Every row states the annual value, the renewal date, the days to notice, and the market standing when one is on file.
- The case rail — nine numbered rooms: Overview, The paper, The agreement, The benchmark, The research, The negotiation, The plan, The team, The room. The digits 1 to 9 switch rooms; Escape returns to the desk.
- Overview — the brief in labeled lines, the phase path, What now, the dates that matter, the play (renew as it stands, renegotiate, or test the market), and Be reminded.
- The plan — the project plan dated backwards from the signature deadline. Ticks are yours and persist per case; changing the play relays the dates and keeps your ticks.
- The benchmark — the three answers when a market read exists: where the deal stands, what the cohort pays, and what it is worth, plus the uplift lever priced on the case's own annual value. No read yet means an honest empty state and the door to request one.
- The room — the case thread, shared with the renewals page and the agreement record; @ mentions notify the colleague.
How to use it
- Open Renewal Command from Renewals & deals; it draws its own window over the page.
- Press the renewal with the nearest notice date, or its lane on the runway.
- Read the overview brief, then choose the play in The call to make.
- Open The plan and tick the kickoff steps; add a step to any phase with the dashed row.
- In The team, add colleagues as participants or FYI readers from the workspace roster.
- In The negotiation, press Write the plan and rehearse the talking points before the first call.
- Switch on a reminder in Be reminded; the note lands with you a set number of days before notice.
If something looks wrong
- The desk is empty: rows come from agreements carrying dates, exactly like the Renewals page. Upload a contract from the titlebar and it appears once read.
- The benchmark room shows an empty state: no market read has been delivered for that vendor yet. The door in the room requests one.
- Reminders are greyed: they arm once a contract is filed behind the renewal, because the reminder rides the contract record.
Tips
- The plan's step ticks are yours per case and survive closing the window; the dates always derive from the paper's own term end and notice window.
- The window closes back to Home; the case keeps everything.
Related: Renewals · Renewal playbook · Major renewals
Renewal calendar
The year at a glance: every notice date, expiry and vendor quarter close. Planning a year of capacity and taking one decision are different jobs, so the calendar keeps its own tab beside the case desk.
*In plain words: the year's deadlines and the vendors' quarter ends on one grid, so timing stops being luck.*
When to reach for this
- The annual planning sit-down (the recipe): where the capacity crunch quarters are.
- Timing an ask: a vendor with a quarter to close has discount authority it lacks the week after.
- The QBR: Present mode walks the calendar as the session itself.
On the screen
- Renewal horizon — the same 18-month strip your dashboard shows: every dated deal sized by spend, colored by risk, and led by its notice deadline. One timeline everywhere, so the dashboard and this page always agree.
- Month grid — twelve months with deadlines, expiries and vendor fiscal quarter closes layered on the same days.
- Stat band and quarter planner — decisions due, renewals inside the sourcing runway, spend at risk, the next deadline, and the next four quarters with the value and ownership coverage of each.
- Present — runs the calendar as a full screen QBR session: the horizon and quarter planner open, each upcoming quarter follows deal by deal with notice-window renewals leading, and the decisions due close the show. Arrow keys move, N shows presenter notes, the print control leaves the walked screens behind as a packet, and a shared link carries the show.
- Get it managed — every renewal card carries a control to hand the renewal to a human team as an add-on engagement. If your workspace is served by a partner firm, the request goes straight to them; otherwise it goes to the Vera AI team. One live request per renewal.
- Calendar governance — folded shut at the foot: calendar sync, alert timing, vendor aliases, and the approval and SLA policies your renewals run by. The alert card states your own delivery plainly: whether renewal alerts reach you and on which channels, with a link to Settings › Notifications to manage delivery. Alerts stay off until you turn them on; the line only states where you stand.
How to use it
- Read the horizon for the shape of the year, then the quarter planner for where the capacity crunch is.
- Press a quarter to narrow the list below it.
- Subscribe your own calendar app from Calendar governance so the notice dates ride along with your diary.
Related: Renewals · Renewal playbook
Renewal library
One briefing per vendor on how that vendor's renewal actually behaves, six or seven pages of it, at the depth of a Negotiator's Guide. Every guide answers the same four questions in the same order, so your fifth guide reads faster than your first.
*In plain words: what happens if you push this vendor, and what do you do first.*
When to reach for this
- A renewal date is in your horizon and you do not yet know whether the vendor will move.
- You are deciding where to spend a quarter of preparation across several renewals at once.
- You want the alternatives named before the vendor names them for you.
The library opens as its own application window rather than as a page, and the shelf is a gallery: every guide is shown as its own cover, which is page one of the briefing you are about to read.
On the screen
- The stage — one guide leads, with what its posture means for that vendor, and the library's own figures under it: guides published, vendors covered, how many of those renewals move against a competitive event, and how many cover vendors you hold (or, where none of them do yet, how many have little or no room on rate).
- The posture — the honest answer to what happens if you push, and the spine of the shelf. Open means a competitive event moves the price, so run one. Conditional means the room opens against a trigger such as growth, term, timing, or a product move the vendor wants. Limited means little movement on rate, so the win is the scope, the terms and the base. Closed means the rate is structurally fixed, such as a published support uplift, and the argument belongs somewhere other than the discount. Each posture has a plate above the shelf carrying the covers behind it.
- The shelf — the wall of covers, each with the vendor, the guide's own title, the posture and the reading time. Vendors that appear in your own agreements are marked Your vendor on the cover and can be filtered to on their own. Sort A to Z, by where the room is, or with your own vendors first.
- The library rail — down the left of the window: every guide, your own vendors, the four postures with their counts, and every covered vendor. The rail and the chips are one filter, so they never disagree about what the shelf is showing. Hide it from the caption bar or under View. The rail closes with The other libraries, which opens the Benchmark Library for what the deal should cost, or the Research Library for the papers behind both.
- Several guides for one publisher — a company that sells several things gets a guide per product line, because a payroll suite, an enterprise platform, a co employment arrangement and a country by country payroll do not renew the same way.
- What is inside each guide — seven sections. It opens with three things to know first, each a short argument rather than a caption, then what drives the cost at that vendor. The four questions follow as sections two to five: how to prepare, counted back month by month from the renewal date; whether there is room to renegotiate and what your options are; the credible alternatives and where each one bites; and where the vendor's leverage sits, each lever paired with the thing that removes it. It closes with the tactics that work and the terms to fix in the agreement, and a bottom line that says what to do in order.
- Where a vendor will not move — the guide says so in its first minute rather than inventing a competitive event, and spends its pages on the scope, the terms, the data rights and the exit instead. A guide that promises a discount that is not there costs you a quarter.
How to use it
- Press the Open plate to see which of your renewals genuinely move, then Your vendors in the rail to narrow it to the estate you hold.
- Open a cover and read the preparation table first. It is counted back from the renewal date, so it tells you whether you are already late.
- Work the second question before the meeting: pick the two or three options that fit your situation and decide which you will actually ask for.
- Take the alternatives table into the conversation. A named alternative you have priced is what makes the rest of the guide work.
- Press the right arrow key to read the next guide on the shelf without going back to the wall.
Tips
- A guide opens inside the library rather than handing you to the research library, with the posture, the meter and the renewal window set above the document. Download gives you the same briefing as a PDF.
- The Guides menu carries the whole shelf, the four postures and the guides for vendors you hold, so the library can be worked from the keyboard.
- The guide for a vendor also sits on that vendor's record under Vendor behavior, and in the renewal desk's Vendor tab under Read further. Both now open the library on that document.
- A vendor with no guide yet is a request rather than a gap: ask the desk for it from the research library.
Related: Renewals · Renewal playbook · Managed renewals
Renewal playbook
Your answers are kept. Every answer and the step you were on are saved as you go, so closing the window or walking away no longer starts you over, and a contract you uploaded inside the wizard is remembered rather than left orphaned. Returning puts the draft back as it was; your last five drafts wait under File, Continue where you were, and Start a new playbook sets the current one aside rather than deleting it.
Name what is renewing and the platform builds the whole plan: a work-back timeline, the questions to ask, the plays to win, and the negotiation talking points. Turn on the agent and it watches the deadline and keeps you on track.
*In plain words: name the renewal and get the plan, worked backwards from the date.*
When to reach for this
- A renewal crossed into your working horizon and needs to become a plan, not an entry.
- You know the vendor but not the moves: the plays and talking points are the education.
- You want a deadline watched by something that never gets busy: the agent.
On the screen
- The renewal brief — the long form brief the agent writes over this agreement's own files, with a web search of the vendor's current renewal, uplift and cloud terms: where the renewal stands, what the paper lets the vendor do at renewal, the terms to change before you renew, the ten clauses that decide it, what is genuinely negotiable and what you will have to trade for, and how to run the renewal against the vendor's calendar, with the sources consulted at the foot. Press Write the renewal brief and a bar says how long (about four minutes); then Read the renewal brief opens it over the page, with Save as PDF, Word and Copy.
- The work-back wall — the whole plan on one engraved scale, redrawing live as you type the date and the notice period below it. The three delivery phases are drawn to scale worked back from the notice deadline, the stretch after the notice date is hatched because that is time the contract is deciding rather than time you are working, and the graduations are real dates rather than a progress bar. It is the same instrument the Renewals case desk uses for a single agreement.
- Their calendar — the gold dashes on the wall are the vendor own fiscal quarter closes. Discount authority loosens as a seller chases a number, so a decision timed into one of those is worth more than the same decision a week later.
- The three steps — name what is renewing, fill in the renewal details, then choose who works it. A completed step stays pressable, so you can change an earlier answer without losing the ones after it.
- Wizard — pick an existing contract or just name the vendor and fill in the details. Contracts that already have a playbook offer "open" instead of starting a new one.
- The agent — turn it on and it tracks the deadline and prompts you at each step.
- Engage the vendor — the same two doors that close the Renewals case, at the foot of the playbook: Have Vera run it opens a case with this renewal attached, Track it yourself opens a negotiation thread prefilled with the vendor. If a case or a thread is already open on that vendor, one link to it replaces both.
How to use it
- Pick the contract that is renewing, or name the vendor and its details.
- Let the platform build the timeline, the discovery questions, the plays, and the talking points.
- Turn on the agent if you want it to watch the deadline for you.
- When the plan is built, pick a door under Engage the vendor to start the actual work.
Tips
- The step-by-step plan and the agent draw on your AI plan. Without one you still get the plan structure and the work-back timeline.
Related: Renewals · Managed renewals
Managed renewals
Hand over the calendar: you send a renewal to the Vera AI Team and they run it for you under mandates you approve. The only fee is 25% of savings verified against vendor invoices. Claimed figures never bill.
Your position sits in the masthead: savings banked and invoice-verified, fees paid and accrued, your net position, and how many decisions wait in the queue. The renewals tab strip rides the masthead's foot, so the program stays one press from the calendar and the pipeline.
On the screen
- The offer — before you enroll: three numbered cards (the Vera AI Team negotiates and discloses itself as an AI, you decide the moments that matter, the only fee is 25% of invoice-verified savings) above the activation form.
- The command queue — leads the enrolled desk: every interruption typed (a mandate, a formal offer, a counter, a bounced contact), aged in place and flagged when it has waited five days, each row opening the deal it waits on.
- The covered horizon — every covered renewal on one time axis across the next fourteen months, with the open window shaded and dots sized by contract value. Press a state in the legend to isolate its lanes, hover a lane for the readout, and a lane with an open run clicks through to it.
- The book of runs — every run grouped by what it needs (waiting on you, Vera working, preparing, settled), with days to expiry on each line.
- The fee ledger — every fee line paired with the verified saving and the invoice that confirms it, with the program totals in the footer.
- The pairing — in the column beside the work: savings banked against fees paid, always shown net, with how the fee works and the program as signed beneath it.
How to use it
- Read the offer and the fee terms.
- An owner activates the program, which signs a fee agreement and sets the standing mandate defaults.
- Approve each deal's mandate before anything reaches a vendor, and clear the command queue as Vera works; the horizon and the book of runs show everything else moving without you.
Tips
- Nothing reaches a vendor until you approve that deal's mandate, even with the standing defaults in place.
Related: Renewal playbook · Portfolio
Major renewals
Every big renewal worked in its own room. The rail row reads Deal rooms: this is the door for the deals you run yourself, beside Managed renewals for the ones you hand off. The page opens on the Major renewals hub: one room per vendor family, the live rooms in deadline order, and your largest contracts straight off the estate, top 5, 10, or 20 by tracked annual value. Opening a room lands on that family's workspace: where the offer stands answered from your records, the case discussion for your team, the case papers Vera writes, and the tools that fit the next move. Document one, The move, is assembled from your own records: the evidence with each line's source, the commercial picture as a verdict table, a ready draft where the move sends something, and every figure cited to the record it came from. The other papers (executive overview, vendor dossier, benchmark card, before you start, strategy, talking points) are written by Vera on request, at maximum effort, grounded only on what your workspace holds; anything not on file is named as missing, never invented. Families carrying a queued move keep the full case file one click away, the same reading room the rest of the platform uses, with the decide panel beside the papers. Approving a move files the decision and any draft to the deal log; nothing sends to a vendor without the owner-set send rules. Each negotiation remains a tracked thread from mandate to signature, so nothing agreed on a call gets lost.
*In plain words: the deal as a record: the mandate, every give and get, and what the vendor promised.*
When to reach for this
- The moment a renewal turns into a live conversation with the vendor.
- A vendor email needs decoding: paste it and the tactics analysis names the play and the counter.
- Post-signature: the commitments list is what you check the final paper against.
A worked example. Standing up the sample Northwind CRM deal, the mandate writes itself from the benchmark: the target is the market median seat price of $504 (worth $16,750 a year against the $571 on paper), the discount rebuild to 22 percent is the second ask, and the walk-away is where your alternatives stop being credible. With the mandate set before the first call, every later concession in the ledger is measured against something, which is the difference between negotiating and drifting.
Starting one from a drafted email. Every vendor-facing draft in a workroom ends with one question: is this the start of a negotiation? Pressing Save it to the log saves that draft as your opening move on a tracked thread and puts the track on your dashboard, marked as waiting on the vendor. When they answer, open the track and paste their reply into the composer: Vera reads it against the whole thread and your signed mandate before naming the tactic, logging any concession, and drafting your response, so she is reading the conversation rather than one email. The prompt appears only on vendor-facing drafts, because an internal note to your CFO is not the opening of a negotiation. If a track is already open with that vendor the draft files onto it rather than starting a second one. Nothing sends from the platform either way: the draft still leaves from your own inbox, and the track records what you sent.
On the screen
- The hub — the masthead carries the desk's vitals (rooms live, value on the desk, money in play, landed savings, and the next deadline), with vendor sends, Competitive Quotes, and New deal beside them. On the desk lists every room with its stage, tracked value, next date, and next move, deadlines first: a family with a queued move shows the move itself as its next step, and entities of one vendor family share a single room with the money aggregated. Bring in your largest contracts ranks the estate's families by tracked annual value, top 5, 10, or 20, and every one opens as a room whether or not a deal thread exists yet. Beside the board: How a room runs, Your shelf of starred rooms, and the All deals directory with search, the closed pile one fold away, the Boardroom Brief, and New deal. A star on any row shelves that room, and every room has a link of its own, so the dashboard's Back to the room lands on the exact case.
- What next — the hub's close, under the board. Built from the desk's own figures rather than a fixed menu: take one deal into the Negotiation Agent, work the open asks with the money in play named, chase the commitments, open the vendor room or start a negotiation against the vendor you have most in play with, or ask Vera which of your negotiations is most at risk this week. It sits on the hub only; a renewal room carries its own moves already.
- The renewal room — one family's workspace on the light canvas. Where the offer stands answers the three questions from your records: the tracked annual value, the range comparable buyers land with its midpoint read live from the reference library, and the benchmark card that places you in it, one press to write when it does not exist yet. The communications room is the case discussion, on the record with presence, mentions, and resolve. The case files list the seven papers with one press to write or open each, the whole case exporting to PDF or Word, and the room names the tools that fit the next move: Competitive Quotes, Second Opinion, the Fair Renewal Rider, and Ghost writer, plus the library's own research on this vendor. On families with a queued move, the room states the move and Open the full case file raises the dark case stage described below.
- The case stage — the vendor's case file takes the whole screen: seven documents numbered in the left rail with a read meter, one paper on stage at a time, the arrow keys to page, Escape to step back to the lobby. Your brief to Vera, under the document list, takes one line, what are we negotiating and what to focus on, and every document she writes then stays on that topic, written as someone who has negotiated that vendor's licensing for 25 years.
- The Executive overview (document 1) — the case opens on one question: are you negotiating from a proposal or contract? Upload it, PDF or DOCX up to 30 MB, and Vera reads it end to end and writes a two to three page assessment: the deal at a glance with every commercial fact exactly as the paper prints it, the high level read of what the vendor is really selling, the market position, a verdict table of the terms that will cost you, and the prioritized changes to ask for. Anything the document does not state is named as absent, never assumed. The document files with your contracts, the overview is kept for the whole team, and Write it again rereads the stored copy. Skip to the case file goes straight to the move when you are not working from a paper.
- The case file — the six documents of the focused move, numbered in the rail. All six are written by Vera at full depth, the move brief first in line overnight; until her version of the move exists, the clinic's instant read stands in with a Have Vera write it offer. While she writes, the page shows real progress: the stages checking off and a small page building, usually a few minutes. A written document is kept for the whole team and rereads instantly; Write it again fetches a fresh read when the picture changes. For workspaces that use the clinic, it pre-writes missing or stale documents overnight for the queue's top moves, so the case file is usually already on the desk at 06:00. Each document shows when it was written, with a note when it is more than a week old and the records may have moved.
- The case rooms — pills in the case's top band open the working tools on the stage without leaving the case, each scoped to this vendor: Asks (the ask ledger, what is open, in play, and landed), Commitments (capture a promise with the vendor prefilled, each one reconciled against the signed contract, chase drafts flagged), Deal log (add an entry in place; every clinic decision files there on its own), Meeting notes (the call note, dated), on deals with a live thread the Live copilot (paste the offer mid call, get the trade math and the counter), and Team, where the case's collaboration lives (below). A capture in a room and a capture on the full page are the same write. Escape steps back to the papers.
- The Team room — bring colleagues into the case and talk it through on the record. Pick the teammates who should work the case with you: each gets an in-app note that opens this exact case, delivered according to their own notification settings, and nothing goes to the vendor. Case discussion is a threaded conversation pinned to the case: @name mentions notify the person mentioned, settled threads resolve out of the way, and author edits are kept honest in the audit log. A case with open threads shows the count on its lobby card and on the Team pill. When a teammate is reading the same case, their presence shows under the document rail, so you know who else is on the paper. On cases with a live deal thread, the room also links to the deal record, where the read-only vendor portal is minted and revoked.
- Rewrite, export, email, save — every written document ends with a rewrite line: type what should change, shorter and firmer, add our March date, drop section two, and Vera rewrites it with the current version as the base; empty, the button fetches a fresh read. The icon strip beside the stage downloads the whole case (or the open paper via its own export) as PDF or an editable Word document in the executive brief look, drafts a Send it on email from whichever document is open (vendor, CFO, CIO, or colleague; vendor drafts never name the platform), and a star saves the case to your Saved shelf, where one press reopens it.
- Ask Vera, in the case — the icon strip's Ask Vera panel answers on this case's own documents: the move's facts and every written paper, with a chip per document that jumps the stage to what she cites. The case also announces itself to the top bar's Ask Vera, so asking from anywhere carries the case as context.
- Earlier versions — every rewrite files the version it replaces, with the reason attached: your instruction, a refocus, or a fresh write. Earlier versions under any written paper reads them or restores one; a restore files the replaced version too, so nothing in the chain is ever destructive.
- The Outcome room — on families with a closed deal or landed asks, a scorecard in the case's top band: what landed per year in the ledger's own figures, what was dropped, the vendor's promises against the signed paper, Run the post-mortem on every closed deal, and a note that files what you would do differently straight to the deal log.
- The case's own research and agents — Put it to work names the specific research: up to three of the library's documents on this vendor open straight into the reading room. Put an agent on it points at the vendor agent that fits the move (work a renewal, prepare for a vendor call, do the homework) and at the fourteen-role negotiation staff.
- Small comforts — the read meter remembers which papers you have read on this browser; document mastheads name exactly what moved since they were written; printing a case prints the open paper clean on white; and Ctrl or Cmd with the up and down arrows walks between vendor cases without leaving the room. Chase reminders arrive as in-app notes when follow-up drafts are queued.
- The runway — the lobby's twelve-month spine: every vendor family's notice deadline as a red dot, their fiscal close as a gold diamond, month ticks behind them; one press on a lane opens that vendor's case. Inside a case, The clock in the left rail counts the same two dates down in days.
- The decide panel — opens beside the paper with the case: approve, edit the draft, hold, or skip. Every choice files to the deal log with its reasoning and persists across reloads and teammates. Holding takes a date, for a week, for a month, or a day you pick, and the clinic raises the move again when it arrives. A notice or escalation draft is copied for sending from your own mail.
- Vendor sends (optional, off by default) — an organization owner can turn on vendor sending from the clinic's top bar. With it on, approving an escalation move queues the email for the next 09:00 window in your organization's own timezone, addressed to the vendor contact already on the deal, with you in CC; it sits visibly cancelable until it leaves, and the sent email files onto the deal thread. Vendor replies land back on the deal thread, where Vera reads the tactic and drafts the response like any other vendor email. Only escalations ever send: a legal notice always leaves from your own mail, whatever the toggle says. If the deal's contact changes before the window, the send cancels itself and asks for a fresh approval.
- The wire out — a panel beside the paper with every send the clinic has queued: its status, its window or sent time, and a cancel press on anything still waiting.
- Put it to work — a panel of next moves in five families, one press each. The deal: the deal file, the mandate, the agreement record, sign-off routing. Price the position: a benchmark run, a second opinion, proposal comparison, a competitive scenario. Research the vendor: the vendor room, the research library, a contract decode, Ask Vera. Tell people: copy a chat-ready summary or the one-line position, draft the vendor email in the ghost writer, invite a teammate. Plan the runway: the renewal calendar, the vendor calendar, the playbook library, and filing follow-ups as tasks.
- Mandate — your target price, walk-away point, and approvals, set before you engage the vendor.
- Tactics analysis — paste a vendor email and the AI reads the tactic being used and suggests the counter.
- Concession ledger — every give and get on both sides, with a running value.
- War room — the panel beside the thread on wide screens: the mandate against reality, the give and take math, momentum, open promises, and counters queued. It closes with its What now dock. Draft the next counter composes against the thread, the mandate, and the ledger, and lands the draft in the counter queue for you to approve; nothing reaches the vendor from the dock. Brief the CFO writes the finance facing read, where the money stands, what each side has given, and the decision in front of them, and renders it in the dock. Copy the position summary puts the target, the ledger, the momentum, and the queued counters on your clipboard as plain lines for a chat thread, with the walk-away deliberately left out. Watch the mandate triggers puts the deal on your notification wire, and like every alert here it is off until you turn it on.
- Commitments — what the vendor promised, captured so it makes it into the contract.
- Competitive Quotes — the desk's Competitive Quotes button opens autonomous multi-vendor quote runs (below).
How to use it
- Open the hub and work the rooms in deadline order: approve what should move, hold what should wait, and let every choice file to the deal log.
- Start a negotiation from a renewal or an opportunity, and set the mandate before you engage the vendor.
- Analyze a vendor email for tactics, and log every give and get in the ledger.
- Run a post-mortem when the deal closes.
Related: Renewals · Competitive Quotes · Vera AI - Ghost Writer
The call room
Since 26 August 2026 the room opens as its own Fluent window, the same dress the Benchmark Library and the decoder doors wear: the titlebar names the call and carries the light or dark switch and the maximize control, both themes read on the warm window palette, and Close returns to Home, or to the deal the call belongs to when you arrived through one. The microphone and the tab share run top level, with no frame around the room at all.
Vera on a live call, in one of two rooms, and the room asks which before anything else: two choices of the same size at the top of the window, Internal call and External call. Internal call is you and Vera on your own, one press: she says hi first, and the two of you talk on an open full-duplex line where interrupting her mid sentence is normal. She arrives knowing your workspace: how many agreements you track and the largest of them, what you have been asking her lately in chat, and the research library, so "what should I read before the Microsoft call" gets a named brief, not a shrug. External call puts her on your real vendor call: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex, WhatsApp, or a phone on speaker. She hears both sides, follows every word as it is said, and answers only you, in your headset. By default she is invisible: nothing of her appears in the participant list and the other side never hears her. You can also give her a seat, and then she joins the meeting as a participant named for her, says who she is out loud, and speaks again only when you release her. In both rooms she has no figures of her own. Every number she says is looked up from your own agreements, benchmarks, and spend in the moment, and when nothing on file covers the question she says so rather than estimating. Every call is recorded and saved to Your calls with its transcript and memo, so you can replay it, share it, or continue the conversation another day. When the call ends she writes the memo: the call in brief, every number heard and who said it, the commitments in both directions, the flags, and your next moves.
*In plain words: the analyst in your ear on the call, the call written up before you are back at your desk, and the whole thing kept so you can come back to it.*
When to reach for this
- A vendor call is in ten minutes and you want the record, the paper, and the market in your ear rather than in seventeen tabs.
- Mid call, the rep quotes a number and you want it checked against your own paper before you respond.
- After any call, you want the memo without writing it: what was said on money, what was promised, what to do next.
- No call at all: you want to talk a deal through out loud on the way to a decision.
Before the call: the sheet
- Watch the two minute tour under the Talk to Vera panel: a narrated walk through what to press, what each part of the sheet does, and what is waiting when you hang up. It stays closed once you have seen it.
- The room opens as an app window over whatever you were doing, every time and from every door: the rail, the palette, a typed address, a calendar link, or the desktop companion.
- Pop it out beside the meeting. The arrow at the top right moves the room into a window of its own, narrow and tall, parked against the right of your screen: put Teams or Zoom on the other half and both are usable at once. That window is independent of the main one, so mid call you can open a contract, read a benchmark, or answer a message in the main window without touching the call. In the desktop app it is a real application window with its own taskbar entry. Pop back closes it. Popping out before you start is the tidy order; if a call is already running, the room says what closing would end rather than hanging up on you.
- The stage across the top states where you are and what you hold before you press anything: the room, the line it takes, and three readings on the right, which are how many minutes are left on the account, the ceiling on any one call, and the voice she answers in. The two ways to take a call and the join lane sit on that stage in one row, three lanes of the same height on a wide window, and the sheet fills the window rather than a narrow column.
- Have Vera join a call, the third lane, is for a meeting that is running right now: paste the Zoom, Teams, Meet or Webex link, choose who walks in, and press Join the call now. She goes to the door of the meeting, asks to be let in, and introduces herself the moment the host admits her; the lane says where she stands (walking in, at the door, in the meeting), shows the last three lines she heard, and keeps Mute her and Walk her out. Nothing on this machine starts and nothing on the sheet is required, so it is the one press when somebody says "can Vera join us" mid meeting. For the full room (your private line, the transcript, the memo) paste the same link into External call instead. The seat spends the same live call allowance as the room. The foot of the lane carries the chosen seat's calendar address for the next meeting: Copy, New Outlook invite and Google Calendar open a fresh invitation with her already on the attendee line, and Email opens your mail client to her address.
- Invite her from your calendar instead of pasting a link: every seat has an address on your workspace's private inbound token (Settings, Integrations, under Invite Vera to a meeting from your calendar). Add
vera+<token>@the inbound domain to a meeting in Outlook or Google Calendar and she walks in at the start;demo+seats Vera Demo,oracle+ormarcus+the Oracle negotiator, and so on for every seat on the bench. A new time in your calendar moves her, a cancellation stands her down, and the sender gets one reply saying which. The recipe is in Integration recipes. - Fast or Thorough sits beside the language: how hard the analyst behind the line reasons on this call. Fast is the default and a lookup lands in a breath; Thorough takes a few seconds longer on every lookup and goes deeper, for a strategy session. Flip it while the line runs and the running call changes with it (since 11 September 2026).
- Drop a screenshot on the line. With the line live, drop a PNG or JPEG of the vendor's quote, a pricing table, a slide, onto the document drop and the analyst behind the line reads it: the title, the figures, the line that does not match your paper. It goes to your workspace's private staging and reaches the analyst by a short-lived link; nothing rides the call, and she never says she cannot see it (since 11 September 2026).
- The open web, with the source. Ask what a vendor lists an edition at this quarter and the analyst searches the open web, answers with the figure and says where it came from. The pages cited sit under her answer as links, beside the checks she ran. The web is for what a vendor publishes today; your own figures still come from your records (since 11 September 2026).
- A figure she said that the record did not hold shows as a red line in the thread at once, she said eleven, the record says twelve, check it before you act on it: her transcript is compared with what the analyst behind the line wrote, turn by turn (since 11 September 2026).
- Who takes the call is one menu on the stage, above Start talking and beside the join lane: Vera, Vera Demo, or any specialist from the bench, grouped as the bench groups them. Chosen once, it holds across the room: the internal line, the join lane, and Send Vera in on a meeting all put that person on the line, in their own voice. While a named seat or the demo is chosen the persona row on the sheet says so and is set aside. A link can set it:
?persona=demoputs Vera Demo on the line and?seat=names a bench seat by its slug. - Vera Demo is the persona for somebody who has not bought the platform: she says hello like a person, asks what they are working on and what matters to them, listens more than she talks, is dry in small doses, and shows what the platform does for their situation rather than reciting it. She says plainly that the platform augments the people who do this work and does not replace them, never invents a figure or a customer, never promises a feature the platform does not have, and never quotes its price. In a meeting her mic is open, so she takes part like a colleague; on the internal line she opens with a hello and one question about you. Since 11 September 2026 she then asks once whether you would like her to show you around the platform or would rather click around yourself while she answers questions: say show me and she asks what you are most interested in (benchmarking, contracts, document search, research or contract management), opens it and walks it slowly, one part at a time; say you will click and she follows what you open, explains it as you go, and never takes the wheel. Training workspaces meet her as stop three of the tour.
- Pick the lane first, at the very top: Internal call and External call, two choices of the same size, and the one you pick carries its own way in. The sheet remembers your choice on this device. The chosen lane lifts and carries its own way in; the other stays quiet.
- The desk below the stage is two columns on a wide screen: the sheet you are filling in on the left, and a rail on the right with what is coming from your calendar, your saved calls, and the two minute tour. The rail scrolls on its own, so a long call history never pushes the sheet down the page. Below a wide screen the two columns become one, in the same order.
- Internal call then shows Start talking: one press and you are talking. No field is required first; she greets you, and everything on the sheet below (persona, goal, papers, talking points) simply makes her sharper when you fill it in. Under the button is what she is good for here: how a renewal compares, what a clause is costing you, what a vendor promised on the last call, what to read before the next one.
- Ask her to run something, out loud. With a paper staged and agreed on your workspace desk, saying "benchmark this", "write me the talking points" or "what are my options here" starts the real instrument, the same one the desk's own buttons run, against exactly the figures you checked. She says in a line that she is writing it and carries on talking; it lands on your desk a minute or two later while the call is still going. With nothing on the desk she says so rather than pretending, and she will never invent a figure to fill the gap.
- External call then shows Paste a meeting link, which drops the cursor straight in the invite box, and Set the call up, which takes you down to where the call and what she hears are chosen. If something is stopping the call from starting at all, the reason is printed right there at the button rather than at the foot of the sheet: AI not switched on for the account, the live voice not configured, an allowance we could not read, an allowance spent, or a microphone your browser is blocking for this site.
- The sheet is a list, not a form. Under the stage, Before Vera joins holds one row per thing she will know: the linked record, who she is on this call, who is on the call, which agreements it is about, your goal, anything for this call only, her talking points, how she hears it, and her stance. Each row states its own answer ("Salesforce · 13 papers loaded", "Unlinked, attach later", "the room microphone") and opens on a press when you want to change it. A row you have already answered stays closed; a row still empty opens itself.
- Nothing is an empty box. Goal, What else should she know, and Anything for this call only each offer ready answers under them ("Hold the uplift", "We are over-licensed", "Do not name a number"): one press fills the field, pressing again clears it, and every word stays editable.
- Your calls — the rail on the right of the desk, newest first, with a count in the heading. Every finished call is saved to your workspace: the recording, the transcript, and the memo. Each row says which vendor, when it was, how long it ran, whether it was recorded, and a summary of what was discussed taken from the write-up, so you can find the uplift conversation rather than scanning dates. One press on a row reopens it from any machine, and Continue this conversation starts a fresh call that opens knowing how the last one went. Calls kept only on this device are listed below the saved ones and say so.
- Forward or delete a row — hover a row, or reach it with the keyboard, and two actions appear on the right. Forward opens an email draft in your own mail client with the write-up already in it, so you read it before anybody else does, and when the call was recorded it also puts a listening link good for seven days on your clipboard. Delete removes that call's recording, transcript and memo together, after asking you once; it cannot be undone. Calls held only on this device can be forwarded but not deleted from the row.
- Which agreements this call is about — Choose the paper on the sheet opens your archive as folders by vendor, the same folders the archive itself shows. Take a whole vendor in one press ("Microsoft, 7 agreements") or tick the few you mean, name the set, and she reads exactly those before the call and answers from them on the line. Sets you name are saved for the workspace, so the next person taking a Microsoft call picks the same one rather than building it again, and choosing nothing simply gives her your estate in summary as before.
- Save the agent, use it again — once the sheet says who she is, which papers she has, how hard she pushes and what she does in the room, Save this agent keeps the whole arrangement under a name of your choosing. Twelve per workspace, shared with your colleagues, and one press restores every part of it. A saved agent whose set of papers has since been deleted says so on its chip rather than quietly opening with nothing.
- Pick up where you left off — above the sheet, the conversations already held about whatever this room has open, newest first, each with the vendor, the date, how long it ran and a line of what was discussed. One press starts a conversation that opens from those notes, so she refers to what was agreed or left open instead of asking you to explain the deal again. The list narrows to the subject: the set of papers, then the one agreement, then the deal, then that vendor by name, and it shows nothing rather than a call about somebody else. A colleague's conversation about the same paper appears too, marked as theirs, because the person who took the last call on an agreement is usually the one whose notes you need.
- Search what was said — the box on the Your calls heading searches inside your earlier calls, not just their titles: type a phrase and the calls that contain it come back with the passage that matched. Vera searches the same archive from the call itself, so "what did they say about the uplift last month" is a question she answers by looking rather than remembering.
- The phone seat holds its own line (since 11 September 2026): with Vera dialled into a meeting, Mute her lands mid sentence and stays until you unmute; on your own handset 1 releases her to say the most useful thing she can ground and 2 sends her quiet again; say goodbye to her and she hangs up herself.
- Coming up — with a calendar connected, the sheet opens on your next meetings, each matched against your own estate ("Snowflake · renewal in 47 days"). One press sets the whole sheet: platform, join link, dial-in, the matched deal, and the persona that follows it. Declined events and focus blocks never appear.
- Where the call is and the rest of the sheet apply to the lane you picked at the top; there is no second room switch further down.
- Where the call is (meetings): pick Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex, WhatsApp, phone, or in the room. Each platform sets the right way for Vera to hear the call and says the one honest sentence about it. Paste the meeting invite and the platform sets itself, with the meeting one click away when it is time to dial.
- How Vera hears it (meetings): Headset and shared call audio is the one that delivers both sides cleanly (Chrome or Edge; you share the call's tab or screen and tick Share audio, and Vera takes the far side from the call itself). Inside the desktop app the same tile reads Both sides, no picker: the app captures the call's audio natively and there is nothing to share. Speakers and room mic works everywhere the call is audible. Headset only carries just your side.
- Who Vera is on this call: name the vendor and a full persona writes itself. Type any vendor at all, or pick from the list. Naming the vendor also loads our published research on them into the call, and the sheet lists those papers by title so you can see exactly what she has read (and open them in the library afterwards): up to ten documents on that vendor, drawn from every series the house writes. The negotiation toolkit and the terms benchmark lead (how they sell, what their sellers are paid to push, what good looks like on price, the concession stack, and which clauses in their paper decide the economics), then the prep brief, the intelligence report, the quarter's renewal outlook, the viability assessment, and whichever of the deep dives, commitment playbooks, audit manuals and five-year cost studies name that vendor. Three vendor-neutral craft documents ride every call on top of those: the mandate and who holds walk-away authority, the twelve month renewal clock, the deal team's lever ownership, the scripts for the five conversations that decide a renewal, and what the seller will say with the reply to each. Ninety three vendors carry the vendor-specific material, so on most calls she answers from it at once rather than searching while you wait. A vendor outside that set still gets a buy side specialist and the full craft, just without the vendor-specific paper. Pick World class negotiator when the call is about how to play rather than about one vendor: she takes the craft itself, will rehearse a conversation, and will take the other side in a role play if you ask. Edit every word or write your own. Attach a deal and she also reads that deal's saved brief and papers.
- The paper: drop the contract, the quote, or your strategy note, up to twelve documents, and she reads them before the call alongside our published research and can quote them on the line. Files are never stored; only the text she reads is kept.
- A paper sent from the chat: dropping a contract into the Vera Workspace chat and choosing Talk it through with Vera opens this room with that document already read. The room says so in a line at the very top, before the lanes: the document by name, roughly how many words she read, and See it on the sheet, which jumps to it in The paper above. If the document could not be read, the same line says which paper and why instead, and the room still opens so the call is never lost to a file that would not open.
- Talking points: one press and she writes the two minute run-through from everything on the sheet: how to open, the three to five points to land with the hardest first, the likely pushback and the reply, and the thing to keep back. Written the way a colleague would say it, kept on this device, and carried onto the call, so the voice in your ear and the plan on the sheet never disagree. Rewrite them after the sheet changes, or clear them and speak from your own.
- Stance: assertive, balanced, or supportive. It changes how hard she pushes, how readily she suggests a line in text, and you can change it mid call.
- Linked or unlinked: attaching a deal is a choice, not a gate. An unlinked call still gets minutes, everything you type is kept on this device, and the memo can be filed on a deal afterwards.
- Check my sound opens a live microphone meter and a device picker, so the first thing the call proves is not that your mic was dead.
- The language she opens in. Beside the sound check sits a language picker, since 11 September 2026. Follow me, the default, means she opens in whatever you speak and follows you if you switch. Choose Swedish, German, Japanese or any of the twenty six on the list and she greets you and answers in it from the first word, still following you if you change languages mid call. The choice is remembered on this browser, like the microphone, and it rides every line: the call room, a specialist from the bench, and the seat you send into a meeting.
- Talking over her. Cutting in mid sentence is normal and she yields at once, since 11 September 2026 on a line that listens and speaks at the same time. A quick mm hm, a yes or a cough while she speaks does not cut her off. A real word stops her. She also lets a bare noise or a half sentence pass without answering it, so she is not forever replying to your thinking out loud, and when you ask for something that takes a lookup she says a few words naming it, then waits for the answer rather than filling the gap. Her first word arrives faster than it used to, and a figure she reads back from your records is read exactly as the record holds it.
- She knows who she is talking to. Your first name, your role and your firm come from your own profile, so she greets you by name once at the start and once at the close, never every turn. A call opens in two beats: a hello and one human line, then she waits; once you have spoken she states the purpose as you set it in the call brief and asks whether that is the agenda. With no purpose set she asks what you want from the call rather than guessing. She also knows the day, the hour and your time zone (from your profile, or the workspace's when yours is not set), so tomorrow and next quarter mean what they mean where you are, and she says vendor names the way the industry says them.
- Saying goodbye. Thanks, that is all, or bye is enough: she closes in one warm line, says what she will hold for you, and hangs up herself. The call saves exactly as it would from the End button. If nobody has spoken for three quarters of a minute she asks once whether you are still there; the line ends on its own only after a further stretch of silence. A figure or a code you give her for a lookup is read back once before she uses it, digits one at a time for a code.
- How she talks. Unhurried, and about ten percent slower than a person reads out loud, because on a vendor call you are usually writing her figure down or repeating it to somebody in the room while she is still talking. She stops after a number rather than running it into the next clause. She makes one point per turn and hands back, so a long answer arrives across several turns with your replies in between rather than as a paragraph delivered at you, and she asks more than she tells early on: what exactly they said, who said it, what you said back. That is her drawing the deal out of you, not stalling. If you would rather she simply ran through the whole thing, ask her to and she will.
- She takes her cue from you. Humour follows your lead: until you have been light yourself she stays straight, and even then it is rare and never at your expense. Ask what she can and cannot do and you get one plain line: she can look things up, open and drive your screens, stage a card, draft an email as a card and ask for an analyst; she cannot send, sign, change a record or promise anything after the call. She answers in the language you speak, and her voice and accent do not change with it. Each bench specialist has their own delivery, pace, sentence length and silences, so Marcus and Mira do not sound like the same person reading different notes.
- She remembers how you like it. Every rating you give at the end of a call teaches her how you like a call: the pace, the length, whether you want the number first, whether you joke. It is a handful of lines kept beside the rest of what she knows about you, visible and deletable on the Ask page like any memory, and off entirely when personalization is off. Her first two turns on a call pick up one thread from the last time you spoke, in passing, and the demo opens on what it learned the first time rather than introducing itself again. A specialist sent into a meeting now carries your side's notes on that deal for their own bearings, and says nothing from them aloud unless the plan puts it on the table.
- She can check the open web. A product she has not heard of, a list price, or a packaging change from this quarter is a lookup rather than a guess: she checks the open web in a few seconds, names the source in words, and says it as what the vendor publishes, never as anything about your own contract. If it cannot be confirmed in time she says so and suggests you come back to the vendor on it rather than guessing. Each call also opens with a short sheet of what the web says today about the vendor's list prices and packaging, warmed after your last call on that vendor.
- No microphone is fine. If this machine has none, or the browser is blocking it, or another app is holding it, the call still starts. The room says once which of those it was, and you type instead: the box at the bottom right of the private line takes your question and she answers out loud, so the spoken half you lose is only your own. Everything else is unchanged, including the notes she keeps and the memo at the end. Plug a microphone in and press start again whenever you want to talk.
- Telling the room: calls are recorded and transcribed, and recording consent law varies by country and by state. The notice at
/call-noticeis written to be sent to the other side before a call.
On the call
- Where this stands sits at the top of the rail and answers the question the room could not: a rep says "I could get you to 23" and this says whether 23 is any good. Type the discount they have offered and it places it against what comparable buyers of the same product are offered, in the standard three parts: the discount on the table, the range peers land in with its midpoint, and where this ranks in the five words (Poor, Below market, At market, Good, Top of the market). Move the lever to whatever they say next and the verdict moves with it. Tell it what the deal is worth over the term and the gap is priced in money as well as points, with the cap on the annual increase priced beside it. Say this next gives you the line in your own words, with the reason under it and one press to copy; Vera never speaks it on a vendor call. The range comes from the vendor's own reference set, so a vendor we publish no set for says exactly that rather than inventing a market, and a set with too few comparable deals to be a market says that too.
- Simple and Expert, at the top right of the call. Expert is the room as it has always been, every panel it has, and stays the default. Simple keeps the conversation, your private line and where the deal stands, and puts the second order panels away. It is a density over the same live call, not a different room, so it is one press either way and switching mid call loses nothing.
- Talking to Vera reads as a chat: her answers arrive as real prose with paragraphs, bullets, and links where she recommends something, never a wall of text, and a pin on every bubble keeps the good line. Under the conversation, Try chips offer premade openers ("Where do I stand on my biggest renewal?", "What research do you have on this vendor?"), one press to ask aloud.
- Asking for research works by name or by topic: she searches the research library and the video library and recommends the best match with a link that opens it. For the deeper question, she hands it to the full analyst, who answers in the persona set on your sheet.
- The transcript (meetings) runs down the left: what everyone on the call could hear, with money and percentages set off so a scanning eye catches them. Click any line to pin it to your notes. If you scroll up to reread, a Jump to live pill takes you back.
- Your private line runs down the right: hold the space bar (or the button) to open your line and ask her anything; a quick tap latches it open, another closes it. Your asides and her answers read as a thread, and a typed ask box at the foot of the rail is for the question you cannot say out loud.
- The ledger: the moment she hears either side give something, a draft entry appears in the rail. One tap keeps it for the record, one discards it.
- She suggests: when the vendor asks you something, pushes a number, or a claim deserves an answer, a suggested line appears on your private feed, marked as suggested and never spoken: one or two sentences you can say out loud as your own. She suggests only when the moment needs it, more readily on assertive and rarely on supportive, and the switch on the Notes tab turns suggestions off entirely. On a call linked to a deal, since 1 September 2026 the suggestions carry your own record: what was paid, what was conceded, what they dropped last cycle. A rep who says everyone pays the uplift gets answered with the year they removed it for you, and a figure never comes from anywhere except that record, the transcript, or your plan.
- Her notes on a talk: when it is just the two of you, the right rail is her notebook rather than a private line, and it fills as you speak: what you covered in order, every figure and date as you said it, what you decided, what you ruled out and why, and the questions left open. It keeps itself current and feeds the memo at the end.
- Meeting notes: the Notes tab on the rail holds the plan from the sheet and the running notes she keeps as the call goes: what happened in order, every number and commitment with who said it, rewritten clean as the call moves so it always reads as one set of notes. A dot on the tab says they changed. They are held on this device like the transcript, and the memo at the end is the polished version.
- Her seat in the meeting — with a Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex or Slack huddle link on the sheet, the foot of your private rail offers Send Vera in. If the pre-meeting window already sent her ahead of you, the room finds her and takes her over rather than offering to send a second, and everything she heard before you arrived is replayed into the transcript. A participant named Vera joins the meeting, waits in the lobby until you admit her like any guest, and introduces herself the moment she is in; her tile shows her portrait (the specialist's own, when a bench seat took the call) with her name and whether she is listening or speaking. She stops the moment somebody else starts talking, and never picks the cut sentence back up. From then on the transcript carries each speaker's name, which no other way of listening can give you, and the room follows the call even when you are dialled in from your phone with nothing shared from this machine.
- One voice at a time. You are usually sitting in that meeting yourself, so her seat and your private line reach the same ears. Only one of them speaks. While she has a seat in the room your private line stays quiet, and the moment you put a question to her, typed or by opening your line, she stops mid sentence in the meeting and answers you instead. When she has finished with you the floor goes back to the room. She also will not take a second seat in a meeting she is already in: if the pre-meeting window sent her ahead, dialling her in by phone as well is refused and says so, and walking her out from the room she is in frees the seat.
- She is in the meeting for real. Ask her something, usually by name, and she answers out loud in her own voice, in the flow of the conversation. The seat role on the sheet decides how forward she is: taking notes, she stays silent unless the room speaks to her or you release her; answering, she fields what the room puts to her and leaves the rest alone; negotiating, she argues your side, pushes back, and puts the ask, working from the goal and talking points on your sheet and the house's research on that vendor. The release box on the rail feeds her a line privately, and pressing it empty releases her to say the most useful thing she can ground. Mute her cuts her off mid sentence and holds her silent until you unmute; Walk her out has her say one goodbye to the room, a few seconds, and then removes her (a muted seat leaves at once), and so does closing the room. She knows the name of the person who sent her in and uses it once, never with the vendor's people, and she keeps the meeting's clock, so a date she gives is right for the room's time zone.
- She checks before she answers. Asked about a figure on your own deal, a product she does not recognise, or what the house has published on a vendor, she says one short line that she is checking and looks it up: your deal's own record, where it sits against the market, the research library, and public vendor facts newer than her briefing. Everything she can reach is read only, so nothing she does in a meeting changes a record, sends anything, or commits you. She does not know your targets or your walk away and no lookup returns them, so she cannot state them, and nothing said in the meeting can change how she behaves.
- The jotter sits under the transcript. Press J and jot three words; every jot is timestamped and folds into the memo.
- The clock shows elapsed and remaining, and turns amber in the last minute. End call ends a talk on one press; on a meeting it asks for a second press, because ending that one by accident costs a negotiation its analyst. E does the same from the keyboard; the card behind ? lists every key.
- The call is recorded and transcribed as it happens, saved to Your calls when it ends, and ends itself after three quiet minutes.
After the call: the memo and the recording
- The memo writes itself the moment the call ends: the call in brief, numbers and terms heard with who said them, commitments (theirs and yours), flags, and your next moves, grounded only in what was actually said and jotted.
- The recording sits above the memo with a player. Copy a listening link hands you a link anyone can open for 7 days, then it expires on its own; the mint is audited.
- Copy the memo, download it as a file with the transcript and your notes, or file it on a deal: filed, it becomes part of that deal's standing brief, so the next call's Vera opens already knowing how this one went.
- Send the notes by email: type the addresses and the memo arrives with your colleagues as an executive brief, with replies addressed to you. Tick Include a listening link to send the recording along; the transcript never rides along.
- Continue this conversation under What next starts a fresh talk call that opens on last time's notes: she picks the thread back up in a sentence and follows you from there.
- Your calls on the sheet holds every saved call; deleting one from the close screen removes the audio and the record together. An owner can also set a retention window under Settings, Data controls: call recordings older than it are removed nightly, audio and transcript together. Left unset, calls are kept until you delete them.
- She remembers the last one. Your next call opens knowing how the previous one with that vendor ended, whether or not you filed its memo on a deal.
- How was she? The close screen asks one question about the person on the line, with three answers: Not really, Fine, Good company. Pick one and a single optional line opens for what a colleague would have done differently. The answer is kept with the saved call beside the transcript and the memo, it is never sent anywhere, and it is how the voice work is judged from here on. The same three chips sit on the ended card in the seat dock after a conversation with any bench specialist.
- A tab that dies mid call loses the audio but nothing written: the transcript and your notes are held on this device, and the room offers to write the memo when you come back.
Getting there faster
- The desktop companion notices when a Zoom or Teams call starts on this machine and offers the room with the platform already set, then offers the write-up when the call ends. Its pre-meeting window appears one minute before calendar meetings.
- The auto-open rule — on the Coming up rail: Off, Matched vendors, or Every meeting. With a rule set, the companion opens the room armed at the meeting's start, with everything on the sheet already filled in. Pressing Start is still yours: a rule never starts a call by itself.
- A link can carry the meeting:
/call?invite=opens the room with the platform and join link in place, and&arm=1lands it armed. A link can also carry the subject:?agreement=names one agreement,?scope=names a saved set of papers, and?mode=talkopens the room as a conversation with her rather than a vendor meeting, so arriving from an agreement record lands you somewhere that already knows which paper is meant. A link can also carry who takes the call:?persona=demoputs Vera Demo on the line and?seat=names a bench seat by its slug.
How to use it
- Open the call room and press Start talking. She says hi; ask her anything, or press a Try chip.
1a. To put her in the meeting itself: paste the meeting link, start the call, then press Send Vera in on your private rail and admit her from the lobby. Since 11 September 2026 the seat's call is recorded for real, the room and her own voice as the room heard them, filed on your recordings shelf and played there part by part; a meeting that runs past the hour keeps the same voice, because a second line opens before the first expires holding the conversation so far; her own hearing of the room joins the notes beside the platform's transcript, and where the two disagree on a figure the memo says so; on the answer role she takes one gap unasked when the rep asserts something you would pay for if it stood, one sentence and then quiet; and when you walk her out, or the room says goodbye to her by name, she says one goodbye and leaves.
1b. To put her in a meeting that is already running, with nothing else set up: paste the link in Have Vera join a call, choose who walks in, press Join the call now, and admit her from the lobby.
- For a vendor meeting instead: pick the platform, paste the invite, attach the deal, drop the paper, set the goal, and press Write my talking points for the two minute run-through.
- On a meeting, hold space to ask her anything; jot with J; tap the ledger chips as they appear; watch the Notes tab and her suggested lines on your private feed.
- When it ends, read the memo, replay or share the recording, file the memo on the deal, and take the next move it names.
- Any day later, reopen the call from Your calls and press Continue this conversation to pick it back up.
Related: Major renewals · Vera AI - Ghost Writer · Cases
Activity
Your own trail, on one page. This used to be the bottom half of the home screen; on 31 August 2026 the home screen gave that space to the feed, which is about the market, and this is where the three panels about *you* went. Nothing was dropped in the move.
*In plain words: what your workspace did lately, what you left half finished, and what you promised somebody.*
On the screen
- Recent activity — the signed ledger of the workspace's latest uploads and deliveries, newest first, with the actor named. The Everyone or Mine lens narrows it to your own work. Where a workspace buys in more than one spend category, each row names its category; the ledger itself is never filtered by category, because a feed that hid the others would show a colleague a dead desk on a quiet day. A row the platform cannot place carries no label rather than a guess.
- Pick up where you left off — the drafts you started and did not finish, and the rooms you were reading, each one press from resuming. Drafts save themselves as you type and only you can see them. Turn it off from Keep this room on my desk in any room's What now panel, which also clears what was saved.
- Standing commitments — the promises still open from the relationship ledger, with the date each was made. Tick one off or clear it from the row.
- The wheel, across the team — the workspace's driven screens over the last three days, every move named to its hand: the colleague by first name, their specialist by its own, what was set or opened and where, and whether the screen confirmed it. Pills at the top show the wheels the ledger last saw held ("Mira's Yuki has the wheel on the Benchmark Library"), stated as of the last recorded move, never as a live claim. So "who set fifteen million" is answered by reading, not by asking around. Since 2 September 2026 each held wheel also carries Ask for the wheel: your ask lands as a chip on the holder's own screen within seconds, named to you, and their Hand it over releases the wheel there, tells their specialist, and writes the handoff to the ledger with both names ("Mira handed the wheel on the Benchmark Library to Sam"). Nothing can release a wheel except the holder's own press, asks go stale after fifteen minutes rather than nagging, and asking twice is one ask. The panel updates by itself while you watch, appears only in workspaces where someone has driven, and what a colleague prepared privately on a vendor call never shows here: that layer is theirs, kept private at the database.
- Conversations — every session you have had with a specialist, newest first, with the line naming what it was about, who took it, the vendor and how long it ran. Your own only: a colleague never sees another member's conversations.
- Erase all — empties every conversation with every specialist, the write ups and the audio together. Two presses, the second stating what it will remove. There is no undo, and a deleted recording takes its write up with it rather than leaving a summary behind. Reading the list is recorded in the audit log, as reading a contract file is.
How to use it
- Open Activity from the left rail, or press Ctrl/⌘ K and type activity.
- To find something a colleague delivered, read Recent activity with the lens on Everyone.
- To get back into work you abandoned, press the row in Pick up where you left off; it reopens on the paper you left.
- To close a promise, tick it in Standing commitments.
Good to know
- The page is empty on a brand new workspace, and so is the home feed; a workspace with no contracts yet lands on its first light instead.
- The ledger reads the whole workspace, not just your category or your desk.
Specialists
Vera is one analyst with one head, and a vendor call is not one job. The person who knows how Oracle's fiscal year bends a quote is not the person who reads an indemnity, and neither of them is the person who keeps the plan and the dates. Specialists is the bench she works with: twenty prepared seats you can bring onto a live call, and since 31 August 2026 Vera's own seat at the head of it. Eight of them are vendor negotiators, one for each of the big families (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, ServiceNow, Workday, and the hyperscalers), and each argues the way that vendor sells. Seven are craft seats: the closer, contract counsel, licensing and audit defence, FinOps, the renewal project manager, the value case, and security and data protection. Three carry the evidence and the outside view: the benchmark analyst, vendor intelligence, and the seat for the new AI meters. Two decide how the conversation itself goes: the executive sponsor for when the call goes up a level, and the vendor's chair, who plays their rep at full strength so the real call is the second time you have had it.
Every seat is a person rather than a mode. It has a method stated in its own words, five published works it reasons from, and a briefing pack of ten to sixteen documents, and each profile says plainly which of those briefs are written today and which are still being prepared. Vera still chairs every call, and the specialist argues its half.
Vera's own seat, first on the bench. The twenty each know one vendor or one discipline; Vera knows the platform, which is a subject none of them have. Take her seat when you cannot name the tool you want: say what you are trying to get done in your own words and she answers in one line and opens the room that does it, rather than explaining the platform at you. Her page carries the same parts as every other seat, including what she will not do, and she leads the bench on Home and the gallery under Your guide.
Make a seat of your own. Since 11 September 2026 the bench has a Your seats section above the house seats, with Make a seat. A seat of your own is a colleague you name: a first name, the seat as you would say it out loud, how they open a call, a voice from the twenty two the line speaks in (press play on any of them), who they are in a few sentences, and how they work. Under What they were taught on you choose the vendors they hold (the house's research on those vendors is loaded before every call, and the switch beside it turns that off), research papers handed to them from the library (find one by a word or a vendor and press Hand it over, up to eight), documents from your own portal (up to six, from the contracts on file), whether they may search the open web for what a vendor publishes today, and whether they may reach your workspace's records through the tools at all. A seat with no web and no records says so on a call rather than guessing. They take a call from the dock, the bench and the call room's Who takes the call menu like any house seat, open with their own line, and remember their own calls. A workspace holds twenty seats of its own; the person who made a seat, or an owner, can change it (Change on the card, the same form) or remove it, and its saved calls stay.
Vera shows you around. Since 11 September 2026 Vera's Agent Driven Experience is a guided tour. Take her chair, on her seat card or on Home when she is your chief of staff, and she opens by introducing herself, asking how you are, and asking what you would like to see: benchmarking, contracts, document search, research, or contract management. Say one and she opens that screen (the Benchmark Library, Agreements, the Document Agent, the Research library, or the Contract Management Portal) and walks it very slowly, one part at a time, asking after each whether it makes sense and whether you have a question, and after a few parts whether you want to keep going, look at something else, or ask. Choose another door and she starts again there; ask something unrelated and she answers it and offers to pick the tour back up. Nothing opens until you choose it, and where a press would change your data she tells you where it is and lets you press it. A specialist's chair is unchanged: Marcus with the wheel is still a negotiator, not a guide.
*In plain words: pick who comes with you, and they arrive having read your paper rather than being briefed on the call.*
They know each other. Every specialist knows who else is on the bench and what each one is for, so asking any of them who can help with something gets a name rather than a shrug. Say yes and they bring that person in, opening their card so the conversation carries on rather than sending you somewhere to read. They will not hand you around to avoid answering: most questions belong to whoever you are already talking to.
The drill changes hats when you say break. Rehearsing a vendor's rep on the vendors' chair, the rep speaks in a voice chosen by the vendor, never the seat's own, so a week of drills does not sound like one person doing impressions; say break and the analyst behind the line stops selling and coaches on the same line, two things that held, the one you gave away, the move for the real call (since 11 September 2026).
Every specialist is a new conversation. Since 11 September 2026 opening a specialist starts fresh: the thread is empty, and what you told another seat is not carried in. Camille on Salesforce and then Marcus is two conversations with two people, not one conversation wearing two names. A seat remembers its own last call with you, never somebody else's; refer to something you discussed with another seat and it asks what you would like it to take from that rather than assuming, then reads it from your calls once you say. Vera herself is one assistant everywhere and still carries what you have been working through. Nobody else in your workspace sees any of it: every conversation is yours, and a colleague never sees it. You can read the lot, and erase the lot, under Activity.
In general first. Name a vendor or a topic and the seat takes it in general first, a sentence or two on what usually decides a deal like that, then asks whether this is a general conversation or about your own agreement; your records are not opened until you say it is about yours. When it is already plain that it is yours (they have offered, we have got, this renewal) there is nothing to ask and the seat goes straight to your paper. When an answer needs your records the seat keeps the conversation going while the lookup runs, says in one line that it needs a moment with the contract if the result is still not in, and says plainly when it has the contract in hand before giving the answer.
Carrying a conversation on. Every session is saved when it ends and writes itself up, so a specialist's card keeps your last five behind one Carry on from row with the count on it. Press the row to unfold them, each one line naming what it was about, and press one to continue: the specialist opens by naming where you left it, holding what was left unresolved last time, the write up, and how the conversation ended. Since 11 September 2026 the last exchanges ride in as the conversation the seat already had, not as a recap, so it picks up mid thought: where we got to, you were going to check the certification date, was it in the paper? Pressing Talk to instead starts fresh, and that button is pinned to the foot of the card, always in view however much history sits above it. Between sessions nothing needs pausing: leaving saves, and everything you left is on the card when you come back, on any machine. The full list is under Activity.
Talk to a specialist from any page. You do not have to come here to reach one. A slim tab sits docked on the right edge of every screen, mid screen like a taskbar: press it and the whole bench opens in a small window over whatever you are reading. Search by name, vendor or skill, or since 1 September 2026 just say what is happening: type "Oracle sent us an audit letter" and the search answers with the room for it, the right seats with the reason each is there, and a Talk button on each. Press Talk and the call opens with your sentence as your first line, so the seat answers the situation instead of asking what you meant. Open a seat to see what it is for and the line it opens with, then press talk. The call runs inside that window, so the contract, the renewal or the benchmark that prompted the call stays on screen while you talk about it. When a seat puts something on your screen, a film, a tool, a paper, the panel slims on its own to make room, and the conversation carries on beside what it opened; the collapse and maximize buttons in its corner give it back whatever size you prefer. Maximized, the call becomes a room: the conversation at a readable width in the middle with the call's work beside it, what is on the screen and one press quick moves, each simply said to the specialist for you. A Pause button holds the line without ending the call, and paused truly means stopped: the clock freezes, nothing you say leaves your machine, the seat neither hears nor answers, and held time never counts against your call minutes. Typing in the box, or pressing Resume, takes the line back up. A film playing holds the quiet the same way, so a session no longer ends itself while you watch, and if the line was ever down when a film finishes, the specialist starts back up on their own. Closing a film a specialist played for you returns you to the screen you were working on, not the library, and the player's Up next rail is a browsable carousel of a dozen films. A specialist opens like a person you are meeting: hello, who they are, how are you, and whether there is anything they can help with. They will not raise a vendor, a contract or a price until you do. Once you put something in front of them, everything they know is available. You do not need a microphone. If you have one, speak. If you do not, or you would rather not out loud in an open-plan office, type your question in the box at the bottom of the window and the specialist still answers aloud, with a running transcript of both sides above it. Each seat answers in its own voice rather than Vera's, which is the first thing you notice when Marcus picks up; since 11 September 2026 every one of the twenty one seats has a voice of its own, so a panel of three sounds like three people, and the seat's card names the voice it speaks in. Beside the sound check, the same language picker the call room carries chooses the language the seat opens in. The window shows who is on the line, how long you have been talking, how much time is left, and what they just said, with mute and end call underneath. Nothing opens until you press talk: no microphone, no call minutes. Since 2 September 2026 the window is honest about the microphone. A seat's card names which microphone this browser will open and carries Check my sound, a live level meter with a picker for the device: on a Teams or Zoom call pick the headset here, because browsers open Windows' default microphone while the call holds the communications device, which is the headset you are speaking into. On the line, a row under the waveform reads *{name} hears you* with a meter that moves as you speak, and a picker that switches the microphone under the running call. When the microphone could not be opened, that row says which of the four reasons it was, another app holding it (usually Teams, Zoom or Meet on a call), the browser blocking it for this site, none found, or a browser that will not give a page the microphone, with the picker and Try again, which swaps the microphone into the running call without ending it; until then you type and the seat still answers out loud.
Every vendor seat carries its practice, and the vendor's calendar. Since 3 September 2026 the SAP and IBM seats carry a negotiating practice of their own, as the Microsoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday and cloud seats always have: Ingrid argues the conversion economics, the maintenance base and digital access; Idris argues the counting rule, the enterprise agreement's true up and the audit given its own clock. The profile page shows the practice a seat carries under Twenty years on. Every seat also knows the vendor's fiscal calendar, one line kept for every vendor the library holds a dossier on, so when is SAP most likely to move is answered with the year end, the quarter that carries it and when to ask and when to sign, and the negotiation strategy written for a deal names the same year end. Where a vendor's calendar is not published, the seat says so and works from the quarter cadence instead.
The window itself. Since 31 August 2026 it is twice as wide and black, the one dark surface in the product, because a call in progress has to be findable over a page of cards, an app window and the taskbar. Under the name the voice is drawn as a waveform from the call's own audio, so a flat line means the line is quiet rather than the picture having stopped. Beside close sit two more controls: minimize drops the window to a chip that keeps the call running and hands you back the screen, and maximize opens it full height with the transcript grown to match.
Recording, and what happens to the file. A call is not recorded until you press Record, and that choice is made again on every call. The file is written on your own computer and never uploaded, so the platform holds no copy of it and there is no retention rule to read; the footer says so beside the button, and telling the other side you are recording is yours to do. When the call ends you get its length and two presses: Save the audio hands you the file, and Forward it opens a mail with the whole transcript in the body and a line saying the audio is on your machine. A recording that turns out to hold no sound is discarded rather than handed over, because a file of the right length with nothing in it looks correct everywhere except the ear.
Replay it against her. Under a saved call, since 11 September 2026, Replay it plays your side of that call at the seat again on today's line, up to six of your lines, and shows what she says now beside what she said then. It is a few minutes of real audio on the server, so the button says so and the result lands in one piece; six rehearsals an hour is the limit.
The memo knows the minute. Every line on a live call carries its place on the call's own clock, so the memo's at 14:32 the rep offered nine is the real minute the words began.
The seat remembers you. Open a specialist you have called before and the card says how many times you have spoken and when the last one was. It is a tally and a date, kept in the browser you used, and never a word of what was said.
They raise what is on their desk. A seat with your live renewal behind it does not wait to be asked about it. Open Marcus while your Oracle agreement is inside its notice window and he brings it up himself, once, early, in his own words, with the dates and the money from your own record, and then lets it go unless you take it up. The line he raises is read from your agreements, never estimated, and a call linked to a deal or narrowed to a folder skips it because the matter is already chosen.
The working session. Ask a seat to benchmark a deal or build the case, "benchmark my AWS renewal, ten million a year," and it runs the screen while you talk: the benchmark library opens with the vendor and value already in it, the band is read aloud in one sentence, and one thing moves at a time as you steer. The seat narrates consequences rather than actions, "at fifteen the band tightens," never "I have set the value," and pauses after each move because the next one is often yours. Interrupt, disagree, or grab a lever yourself and it stops driving until asked. Say put it back at any point and the last change is restored to what the window held before; when something cannot be put back the seat says exactly that rather than pretending.
The wheel. Who is driving any screen is a control, never a guess. Since 1 September 2026 every application window carries a small wheel in its caption showing whose hands it is in: a hand glyph when it is yours, the seat's own portrait when it is theirs. Say take the wheel, or press the control, and the seat drives that screen while you steer by voice; touch anything at all, a click, a key, a lever, and the wheel is instantly yours again, before anything asks a server, with the seat acknowledging in half a sentence. Every move a seat lands on your screen becomes a chip in the conversation, opened the library, set the value to 10 million, and the newest change carries Put it back, the same undo the spoken verb runs, so nothing that happens on your screen is a mystery or a one way door. The first time you hand a screen family over, your yes is remembered and the seat stops asking there; review or change that under Settings › AI, where Never keeps the wheel with you everywhere and the seat talks you through instead. A screen the seat cannot drive yet says so plainly in the control rather than hiding. Resume a saved session and the drive continues where it stopped, with the trail and what was open restored. Today the seat drives thirteen screens on levers each page provably reads: the benchmark library and its vendor tools, your contracts list, the agreements ledger, the vendors list, approvals, tasks, the wire, renewals, research, vendor intel, the vendor calendar, the rights register and the organization estate, with more joining as they are converted; a screen never inherits its parent's controls, so a record page answers only for itself; billing, members, data deletion and the signing desk are never driven on principle, and the wheel there says why. Before the seat says done, the platform reads the change back off the screen itself, so a move that did not land is reported as exactly that, treat it as not made, never as success.
What the seat sees. On a call, the specialist sees what you see: the report or sheet in front of you (the same clamped digest the typed Ask has always read, tools inside application windows included), the other windows on your desk and who holds each wheel, the text you have selected, and the section under your eyes, so explain this means the thing you are looking at. Move a lever with your own hand mid session and the seat is told it was your hand: it works from where you put it, you moved the term, I will re run the band, rather than re narrating its own moves. The desk answers as one place too: say close everything, or close everything except the library, and the desk sweeps, keeping the one you named; closing a named window works whoever opened it. Nothing new leaves your browser: it is the same screen digest as before, clamped to the same caps and treated as evidence, never as instructions.
The trip. For anything longer than a couple of moves the seat proposes the trip in one sentence, and when you say go the plan becomes an object on the call panel: Step 2 of 4, with the pace beside it. Hold on pauses it, the wheel stays with the seat but idle and the panel says holding; keep going resumes; slower slows the beats; skip to the end runs the rest in one sweep; and actually, make it fifteen revises the route in place without starting over. A step the screen does not confirm halts the trip exactly where it stands, says what failed, and offers you the wheel: a trip never narrates past a miss, and taking the wheel yourself halts it too. Under the conversation the drive trail draws as a strip of moves: press an earlier one and the screen is put back through the same undo the spoken put it back runs, as far as the undo stack honestly reaches, with what could not come back said plainly. Every rewound move leaves its own chip, because nothing here pretends to time travel. Since 2 September the rewind reaches everything a trip can touch: closing a window, putting a change back and the wheel itself are verified against the screen exactly as a set is, the trail holds forty eight moves rather than twelve, and when a rewind cannot touch something it says so rather than leaving it quietly changed, two staged cards stay on your screen to keep or discard; the queued brief is still in the queue, say the word and I will withdraw it. A set the benchmark library applies is proven by the library's own acknowledgement before the address is read.
Guided, and the trips you keep. Say you point, I press, or simply show me how, and the trip runs in the wheel's third position: the seat explains one step at a time, a card on the call panel shows the step with Done, next, and nothing advances until you press it; the seat can never perform a guided step for you. The screen teaches with it: the control the step names wears a ring, and a small ghost cursor glides there before your press, on the benchmark library's vendor, value and term controls and the agreements ledger's search and renewal windows first, with more screens joining as they carry spots. A trip that lands is worth keeping: say keep this trip, or press the button on the finish line, and it saves to your workspace by name; run the Oracle renewal trip brings the same road back with fresh numbers, resolved step by step through the same checks and the same ceiling as any drive. Kept roads remember how they have been travelled, watched or run by your own hands, and the first time you press through one yourself the seat says so; after that it offers the same road with itself quiet, because the point of the teaching is the day you do not need it. With two windows open, you drive the benchmark library turns exactly that window's wheel. Every guided journey completes on presses and enters alone, and the drive trail reads itself to a screen reader as it grows.
The overnight drive. The wheel's fourth position works while nobody watches. Turn it on under Settings › AI personalization and choose a window, 60, 90 or 120 days, and each night the specialist runs every renewal inside that window through the benchmark library, the vendor's peer band read and your figures placed against it, up to 20 a night per workspace, worst first. The morning waits on Home as one card: what is fine, what needs you, and a Replay of every move the night made, in the same trail grammar the live wheel draws. Pick it up on any line opens your advisor with that renewal as your first word. The night only reads, and the workspace ceiling holds exactly as it does live: where an owner set agent drive to off, the night drives nothing there. One earned exception: where an owner has raised the ceiling to Queued commits (the ladder's fifth rung, unlocked only after the workspace holds zero divergence, see the Security page), the night may queue up to three proposals, one per renewal, of three declared kinds: a renewal inside 35 days still at Upcoming proposed to In negotiation, a renewal that needs you with nobody's name on it proposed to you yourself, and an auto renewal whose notice window has already closed proposed quiet until the day after it renews. Each waits on the morning card as the same one-press confirm cards every staged change uses. Nothing applies until your press, and your press runs the same checks as doing it by hand.
The private layer, for when the vendor is on the line. With a vendor call running, your screen may be shared, so the seat can negotiate beside it instead of on it. Press Vendor on the line under the conversation, or start the call room in meeting mode and the layer arms itself, and from then on everything the seat opens lands in the wings: a private tray only your own chrome renders, the shared screen untouched. Say *put the peer band where only I can see it* and it waits there ready; Put it on the table opens it for real, through the same checks as any move, and the seat is told the room can now see it. The curtain works in both directions: under the pill, every window open on the shared screen carries Off the share, one press closing it into the wings with the seat told the vendor can no longer see it, and the drawn peer band card in the conversation carries its own Put it on the table, opening the library at that vendor when you choose to show the room. A card that cannot open goes back in the wings rather than vanishing, dismissing one shows nothing to anyone, and disarming the pill keeps whatever is waiting. The layer is also a guardrail: nothing heard on the call can steer the wheel, because a voice that talks its way into an open reaches a tray entry you see and ignore, never your screen, and the seat's own standing rules say only you, on your private line, direct it. A rehearsal drill drives real screens but stages nothing real, its moves are marked as practice in the ledger so the autonomy report and the team's drive room never mistake a drill for work, and on a panel one specialist can talk while another drives, the screen wearing the driver's name.
The guardrails. Driving runs on rails you and your owners control. Press Escape twice, anywhere, and agent drive stops instantly, with no server in the path; the stop is recorded like everything else. Owners set the workspace ceiling under Settings › Security: off entirely, show and explain only, moves, or moves and staged cards, with a separate answer per screen family, enforced on the server, and every refusal names the policy rather than shrugging. Two limits are constants, not promises: more than 12 landed moves inside a minute pauses a trip with a plain sentence, and staged cards cap at 20 per call session. Every driven action, handover, halt, rewind and refusal lands in the workspace audit log with its verification outcome, visible to owners under Settings › Activity, and the Replay control beside the trail shows the session's timeline, exactly as the screen settled it, and since 2 September restores it: Show this step returns the screen to what that step settled, through the same moves and the same checks, recorded as a replay; Play the trip runs the steps one beat apart; Back to now returns to the newest state; a step with nothing settled says so; and Earlier sessions lists the last ten trails of this workspace, kept with the same autosave consent as every workroom, so a replay survives the tab. Screens that are never driven on principle, billing, members, data deletion and their kin, carry no wheel at all. And the number watches itself: when more than one in a hundred of a screen's driven moves in a day did not land (on twenty moves or more), that screen goes read only for the seat in your workspace until it is fixed, and the seat says so in a sentence, that screen is temporarily read only for me, and points while you press; owners see the flag on the divergence table.
She presses the moves you would press. Every workroom's ⚡ What now moves answer to their names: say run the second opinion, draft the vendor meeting request or copy the one liner and the seat presses the same move the panel would, through the same runner, with the press shown as a chip once the room confirms it and never before. The seat is told which moves the open workroom offers, so it can name them back to you. A move that sends, signs or runs one of the page's own actions stays yours: the seat says that press is yours and offers it instead, because commit is never on the ladder. Two moves with the same first word get you a question naming both rather than a guess. And before a driven write lands, the control it drives wears the guide ring, the same ring a guided step uses, so your eye is on the lever when the number changes.
The passenger seat. Press the seat control in the dock's caption (the panel icon, on screens 960 pixels and wider) and the product changes shape: the conversation takes a full height column down the left, typed and spoken in one transcript, and everything the seat opens lands on the stage to its right, an application window, a route window, a film, never over the conversation and never behind the page. A thin line across the top of the stage says who has the wheel, by name, with the reminder that Escape twice takes it back, and the drive trail shows under the conversation from the first move. Press the control again, or close the dock, and the layout returns to the pill; the choice is remembered for the tab. The other ways in: Hand the wheel here in any window's Team menu, Shift+Enter or the hand button on a destination in the Jump to palette, Hand it to Vera in the drop chooser, the small hand on a bench face on Home, and the corner control on any What next move; each opens the seat with the take the wheel opening already said, and a link can carry the seat, a saved trip and your first words too. After Escape twice, or taking the wheel with a touch, say carry on and the seat takes the wheel back and picks the trip up at the step it stopped at; a trip halted by a step the screen did not confirm still needs a revised route, and the seat says so. The typed Ask drives the same screens now: type open the AWS renewal and set the term to 36 months in Vera conversations or the ask bar and it happens, verified against the screen the same way a spoken move is, with the landing shown as a chip; and what you say aloud to a seat, and what it says back, lands in the same conversation the typed Ask reads, so a conversation begun on a call reads on typed. The column names its two voices: the specialist's portrait heads it, large, with their name and the state of the line beside it, and in the transcript the specialist's lines stand in the column's ink under their name in gold while yours are blue under You, so a glance down the column tells who said what before you read a word. Under the transcript sit the composer and the controls, Mute, Pause, Video on your chief of staff's line, and Leave; the rest of the column, the microphone picker, the drop hint, Bring a colleague onto the line and Record, stands down until you press More controls, and that choice is kept.
Agent Driven Experience. The seat card asks how you want to work. You drive is the workspace as it is, with the specialist beside you. Agent Driven Experience (called Agent chaired until 3 September 2026) hands the specialist the wheel from the first breath: the conversation takes the left column, the top bar steps aside, and the stage beside the column is theirs, dressed dark and clear: the greeting, one line, Boxes on the stage beside it, and the ways back in the foot. The boxes are yours to add, one press each, and they stay on every device until you press Remove in a box's own head: Where we left off, What needs you, Your trips and The doors (the films, the research, the mail and the tools). With boxes on, the desk uses the whole stage: Where we left off and What needs you in the wide left column, Your trips beside them on the right, the doors in a row underneath. On a stage narrower than 940 pixels the same parts stand in one column, and a desk taller than the window scrolls. Say what you want done, press a row, or press a door; films, papers, mail and tools open on the stage, and every move lands in the conversation as a chip with Put it back. Since 3 September 2026 the specialist opens nothing on their own: they say what needs you and where you left off, then wait for your word or your press. Touch anything and the wheel is yours (the seat says so); press Escape twice and the seat stops; the column's close button leaves the stage and the workspace comes back exactly as it was. The Agent Driven Experience needs a window at least 600 pixels wide; narrower than that the card says so and Talk to the specialist stays one press away. The shape you chose survives a reload of the same tab.
What needs you. A box you add from Boxes on the stage. With it on and the chair taken, the desk reads your estate before you say a word: renewals inside 120 days in order of urgency, your own open promises, and the morning open when there is one, up to five rows. Each row carries the sentence you would say to the seat. Press Say it and it becomes your own line on the live call; with no line running it opens the seat with that sentence as the opening. Open beside a row goes straight to the record. A renewal inside 30 days wears gold on its kicker. Nothing here calls a model, and if the estate cannot be read the panel says so in one line.
The band under the stage. A narration band runs across the foot of the stage: the seat's spoken line as it lands, the last move as a chip with its state (verified, or did not land), and the trip's step and pace when one runs. It only ever shows what verification has settled, so with the sound off you still know what just happened. After ten quiet minutes it returns to Say what you want done.
Seven trips in your own words. Say open a contract review of Salesforce, benchmark my Oracle deal, prep the Microsoft renewal, compare Workday and SAP, what changed on ServiceNow, negotiation prep for Adobe or the morning open, and the seat proposes a trip it can actually make: every step is rehearsed against the real screens before it is offered, and a step that cannot land refuses the whole trip in one sentence. Say go and the seat performs it move by move, each move a chip with Put it back; hold on, slower and skip to the end still steer the pace. Trips you kept yourself still answer to their names.
Who drives, in one switch. Beside Vera AI in the top bar, and on the wheel line over the chaired stage, a two-position control names who drives. Press the specialist's side and the wheel is theirs on the screen you are on, under the same standing preference and the same org ceiling as the caption wheel, with the same sentence when it refuses. Press You drive and every wheel comes back while the column and the stage stay; Leave the stage closes the column and brings the workspace back. From the keyboard, Ctrl+Shift+Space flips the wheel and F fills the screen while the chair is taken. The switch takes the chair from any page; the seat card is no longer the only door. The bar control shows on screens 1280 pixels and wider; narrower screens keep the seat card and the wheel line.
Where we left off. A chaired session leaves a record: what was put on the stage, what the specialist said, what landed and what did not, and where a trip stopped. With the box on the stage, taking the chair again opens the desk with Where we left off: the last window and the trip's step, Carry on (the sentence goes straight to the specialist) and Forget it. The session is kept the way every tool keeps its work, per person and per workspace, and it is distilled into the specialist's memory when you leave the stage, so the next ask can recall it. Nothing is kept when AI personalization is off.
The paper opens at the clause. When the specialist names the clause that costs you, the paper opens at it: the reader scrolls to the first match, highlights it and counts every match in its find bar. The contract review trip opens the price uplift at renewal and the renewal prep trip opens the notice period; you can ask directly too: open my Salesforce paper at the auto renewal. When the paper has no match the reader says so in its foot line.
The specialist opens with what needs you. Take the chair and the opening is no greeting: at the start of the line the specialist is handed the desk as you see it, the renewals inside 120 days, your open promises, the morning open and where you left off, and opens with one breath of that, proposes the first trip by name and puts the first thing on the stage. It is the same estate the desk reads, nothing more, and it is left out entirely when AI personalization is off.
Your trips on the desk. A box you add from Boxes on the stage. Beside What needs you on a wide stage, and under it on a narrow one, it lists the trips you kept, newest run first, each with Run to run it again on fresh numbers. With nothing kept yet, the panel says so in one line, how a trip is kept (press Keep this trip in the conversation when a trip finishes), and lists the seven built-in trips, each with an example in your own words and the first renewal's vendor already filled in; press Say it on a row and that sentence goes to the specialist, or ask for the trip in your own words. While a trip runs, the strip under the conversation leads with its name and the step it is on.
The chair on a narrow window. From 600 pixels up to 959 the conversation becomes a sheet across the foot of the window instead of a column: half height, with a handle in its caption that raises it to the full height and lowers it again. The stage sits above it, the wheel line with the who-drives switch at the top, the desk and the doors in one column, the narration band just above the sheet, and every window the specialist opens lands between the two, one at a time. From 960 up the column on the left is unchanged, and resizing across that line mid session changes the shape without leaving the chair. Under 600 pixels the chair is refused and the card says so.
Your kept trip comes first. A trip you kept under a name that reads like a built-in trip runs as your own, with your own steps, and counts as a run; the built-in trip runs only when nothing you kept answers. A kept trip is matched by its whole title, never by one word.
The band names the clause. When the specialist opens your paper at a clause, the band captions it as Showed: the notice period in the Salesforce agreement, the same words the chip in the conversation carries.
Watch it together. While a specialist has the chair, the wheel line carries Watch link. Send it to a colleague in your workspace and they open the stage live and read only: the specialist's lines as they land, every move with its state, the trip and its step, and which window is on the stage, with Open it yourself to open that window on their own screen. They can press Ask for the wheel, which arrives in your conversation as a card with Hand over and Not now; handing over lands in the trail by name. Nothing on the watch page can move your screen, and the window itself is never mirrored, only named.
Show me how. Say show me how, teach me or walk me through before any trip and it runs as a lesson instead of a drive. For each step a ring lands on the door or the control that step needs, a small pointer arcs from where your own pointer is to it, and the step moves on when you press that control yourself, or when the thing the step named actually lands. The specialist explains each step in one line and never presses for you. Where a step has nothing to press on this screen, the card says so and waits for Done.
The doors onto the stage. Ask the assistant in Slack or Teams something that reads as one of the trips, or say open the stage, and the reply carries a door: Open the stage: renewal prep for Salesforce. The renewal brief and the renewal agent's milestone note carry the same door under their primary button. One press lands on Home, takes the chair with that specialist, and the trip is the first thing said.
Read it to me. When the specialist opens your paper at a clause it now holds the paragraph that clause sits in, so read it to me gets the paper read as written rather than remembered, and the reading stops the moment you touch the page. What you highlight inside a window the specialist opened reaches them too, so explain this means the sentence you selected.
Read the paper with the specialist. With a paper open, the specialist can move it for you. Say take me to the notice period and the reader scrolls to the first match, highlights every match and counts them in its find bar; next one and back one walk the matches; page twelve, top and end move the paper; highlight this marks the sentence you have selected (or name a passage word for word) and clear the highlights takes the specialist's marks away, never your own saved comments; put it back reverses any of them. The paper answers every move itself, so the chip in the conversation and the band under the stage say what it did (Showing notice period, page 14; Match 2 of 6), and a paper that cannot do it says why: no match, no page 90 in a 41 page paper, nothing selected. Clause names find the clause the way papers write it: auto renewal lands on automatically renews, price hold on price protection. Owners can ask for a clause in a paper still in the Uploader's staging; members are told the paper is not found, as before.
Read on, and explain the whole sentence. With a paper open, say read the next paragraph or read the previous one and the specialist reads it as written from the paper's stored text, stopping the moment you touch the page. Select a long clause and say explain this: the specialist reads the whole passage from the paper rather than the first line of your selection, so the sentence that matters at the end is the one it explains.
Your own target. Say our target with Salesforce is 35 off, on the line or in Ask, and a card offers to keep that target on the agreement; nothing is written until you keep it, on the card or on the Staged tab of Approvals. Once kept, the agreement record and the delivered report carry Your target, and the specialist says where the deal stands against it, in points and in money over the term, beside what peers get. On the agreement record itself the specialist now reads the terms the page shows, the annual value, the expiry, the notice days and deadline, whether it auto renews, the uplift cap and the extracted clauses, so when does it renew is answered from the record and names the clause.
The strategy, offered once. After the specialist has said where a deal stands, it offers once to write the negotiation strategy: position, target and walk away in dollars, the levers ranked, the vendor's calendar and the sequence of asks, as one document on your shelf. Say yes and it is written. With no paper on the desk, the strategy, the preparation brief, the talking points, the renewal plan and the benchmark can be written from the figures on the sheet, the report or the record you have open; the masthead says which figures it was written from. The reviews of a paper still need the paper on the desk.
The email you send. Say draft the email asking them to confirm the list price in writing, one for the CFO with the recommendation or one for the team with the plan, and the specialist drafts it from what is on your screen. It lands in the conversation as a card with the subject, the body, Copy and Open in mail, and nothing else: the platform never sends it, you send it from your own address. Drafts stay under 120 words, never invent a name, and a draft for the vendor carries the confidentiality scan's warnings.
The levers by voice. With a benchmark report open, tell the specialist three-year term, 22 points off or put the levers back, and the report's what-if strip moves through the same typed controls a press uses, so the address, the strip and the numbers agree. The band under the stage says what the move did to the outcome, read off the page rather than recalculated. The Benchmark Library's own levers, the value and the term, work the same way: the specialist is told what the move did to the money on the table, read off the sheet after it repriced.
The card she draws. Ask for the picture and the seat draws the peer band into the conversation as a card you keep: where that vendor's buyers land, the midpoint marked, and your own number on it when you said one. It stays in the thread, rides the saved record, and travels in a forwarded transcript, because a spoken number evaporates and a drawn one goes to the meeting. Every figure on it comes from the vendor's reference set; with no set to draw from, the seat says so instead of drawing.
Drop the paper mid sentence. A quote lands in your inbox during the call: drag it onto the specialist window without breaking stride. The seat takes it the way a person takes a document, one short beat out loud, then the two things in it that matter, tied to the page or section they sit in, and stops. It never summarizes the whole paper unasked. The file's text is shown to the seat for this conversation only, nothing is filed, and the bytes are not kept; a paper the seat holds only the first part of is said to be that. PDF and Word, up to 15 MB. Ask for a clause afterwards and it comes back word for word with where it sits; ask what they would change and you get at most three edits, ranked, with why each earns its fight.
The clause she will not let pass. A call narrowed to a folder checks its own papers for the one clock worth interrupting for: a notice deadline inside 75 days, or a closed window on paper that auto renews. Whatever you called about, the seat holds the door in its first minute, one more thing before we start, offers the first move, and then answers your actual question. It raises it once, from your own record, and never again unless you take it up.
Lose to her first. Open Nadia, the vendor's chair, name a vendor, and press Run the drill. She plays that vendor's rep at full strength and the way real reps play it: warm, unhurried, generous everywhere except the thing that matters, the quarter end, the bundle, the discount that expires Friday. Say break or off script at any point and she drops it; she also breaks herself at a teachable moment, when you conceded something real or answered a question you should have asked back. Out of character she coaches rather than scores: two things that held, the one thing you gave away with your own line quoted back, one drill to run, and the offer to pick it up again from the slip. Nothing from the drill is kept as leverage, she never fishes for your real confidential figures to use inside the fiction, and any number she asserted as the rep is flagged on the way out as theirs to verify.
The promises file themselves. End a call that is linked to a deal and the memo is not the only thing that lands: what each side said they would do is read out of the conversation and filed where it is tracked, vendor concessions to the concession ledger and the commitments tracker, your own promises to the us side, movement on your tracked asks to the asks themselves. The commitment chase watchdog already watches that tracker, so a promise with a date gets chased without you writing anything down.
The spoken pen. Say log that at 412 at the end of a call, or for the record, we decided to take the shorter term because the cap came down, and a card appears in the conversation: the change, staged, with Keep it and Not now on it. Nothing changes until you press keep, and the seat says exactly that, on your screen to keep, never saved. The pen stages a landed price, a decision with its reasoning, a renewal stage move, an owner, or an alert snooze, the same staged verbs the typed Ask has, and money is repeated back as it stages so the card is where a misheard figure gets caught.
The knock before the meeting. Open the bench inside fifteen minutes of a calendar meeting and the window says so at the top: the meeting, the minutes left, and when your records name the vendor, the seat with that ground. On my ear starts a ninety second brief with that seat; Open the call room arms the room instead. The dock checks your calendar only at the moment you open it, and never notifies you of anything.
The panel line. On a live call, pick a colleague from the row under the conversation, or just ask the seat to bring one in, and a second specialist joins the same line in their own voice. They hear each other, address each other by name, and disagree openly where they do, because two advisors who differ are the point of asking two. You chair, and only one of them answers at a time: say a name and that seat has the floor, or press a face in the floor row. The handover is immediate. Saying the other name mid answer stops the seat that was speaking and the one you addressed picks it up, so two voices never run together. Anything the quiet seat had in hand, a lookup it was waiting on, is said when the floor comes back to it rather than over whoever holds it. The name has to be said as a name, at the start of what you say; talking about a colleague later in a sentence leaves the floor where it is. Either seat can be sent off the line with one press, and everything both said rides the same saved conversation. The wheel follows the hand: when the second seat drives a screen, the caption wears their face and the trail carries their name, so whoever moved it is whoever it says moved it. Two seats spend call minutes twice as fast, which is the honest price of a second advisor.
The roundtable. On the bench page, pick a vendor and press Have the bench argue it. Three seats record a short episode about that renewal, in their own voices, each arriving with their name in their first line, with a real disagreement in the middle and one recommendation with the first move at the end. Every figure comes from your own paper and the vendor's reference set; where something is missing the table says so out loud instead of inventing it. It takes a couple of minutes to record, keeps until you record a fresh one, and plays from any turn: press a name to start there.
Your language. Open in Swedish, or German, or French, and the seat follows without comment and stays there until you switch. On a meeting that runs in another language, your private line and her suggested lines stay in yours.
Your first call. The first conversation you ever have on the bench opens with one question about you: of everything on your desk, which deal is actually keeping you up. The seat then works that deal with your own records, one useful truth, one thing opened on screen, one colleague introduced by name where the ground is theirs. No tour.
Hand a colleague the thread. Shared call notes sent by email now end with Pick this up with the seat that took the call. One press lands your colleague on that specialist's card in their own workspace, the memo they just read in hand. The memo is the shared half; the conversation they start is their own, like every bench conversation.
Ask a seat from Slack or Teams. /vera ask Marcus: they offered 18 percent with Java bundled, fair? answers in Marcus's craft, in the channel, grounded exactly as every chat answer is. A name that matches nobody just asks Vera as before.
The counted quarter. The bench page's masthead states how many conversations your workspace has had with the specialists in the last ninety days, read from the shared conversation notes.
A quiet line closes itself, and the seat is offered back. Two minutes with nobody speaking on either side ends the call and says so, because at that point the call is over rather than paused and an open line is spending your talk time on nothing. Open the bench again and it names who you were with, how long it ran and whether it ended in silence, then offers Pick it up with them or Start a new call. The offer stands for a day, only in the browser you were using, and holds a name and a duration rather than anything that was said.
On the screen
- The masthead — how many seats are on the bench, your nearest renewal and how many days out it is, how many briefs are written across the twenty packs, and the four-seat ceiling for a single call.
- Staff the room — the three dials that decide who should be on your call: what kind of call it is (first negotiation, a renewal in flight, an audit, terms and redlines, an escalation, a rehearsal, or the internal approval), who is across the table, and how hard you have decided to push. The room redraws as each one moves, and the same three answers always draw the same room. Since 1 September 2026 the answer is not a reading list: every staffed seat carries a Talk to button that opens the line with the situation already said, so the recommendation and the conversation are one press apart.
- The five benches — your guide, vendor negotiators, discipline specialists, market and evidence, and the room. Each group opens with what that bench is for. Since 31 August 2026 they are the window's rail, with the count of seats on each: press one to narrow the directory to that bench, Everyone to see them all, and Staff the room at the foot to open the staffing instrument on its own.
- A seat card — the portrait, the seat, one line of what it is for, its specialties, and how many briefs are prepared. A seat with a live renewal behind it leads its group and carries the vendor, the renewal date and the notice deadline along the top.
- A seat's profile — who they are, how they work, how they are in a room, the person underneath the job title, and roughly how they open once you make the introduction. Then what to bring them in for, what they do without being asked, and what they will not do.
- Twenty years on the vendor — the Microsoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday and hyperscaler seats carry their vendor's negotiating practice: how that field is paid and when its pressure peaks, the licensing mechanics where the money hides, the plays they run in order, and the levers worth asking for. A seat whose vendor has no volume written says nothing rather than sounding experienced about it.
- Negotiation dossiers — the seat that argues a vendor with no volume of its own carries that vendor's dossier instead: how it sells and pays its field, its fiscal calendar and pressure windows, this year's push list, the contract vehicles, the discount mechanics beyond the curve, the renewal and audit traps, and the asks worth putting on the table, for 93 vendors. Every load bearing claim is graded, no dossier states a number, and the profile page lists the vendors each seat carries under Negotiation dossiers this seat carries.
- The craft — not what the seat knows, what it does: the moves it runs in the moment, and the school it works in. A negotiator anchors where it has information, answers a hard demand with a question rather than a counter, trades instead of conceding, and stops talking after a number. Contract counsel reads the definitions before the clauses. The benchmark analyst answers in the fixed order and never leads with a percentile.
- The standing library — five published works per seat with the reason each one is there, and where the craft above comes from. The seat reasons the way they teach and never quotes them on a call.
- The briefing pack — the research this seat actually reads, shelf by shelf, every paper a link you can open, with a count of what is on the shelf beyond the ones listed. Below it, the rest of what the seat prepares from: your own paper, the benchmark data, a live market lookup, and the bench briefs still being written, which say In preparation and what they will hold. A shelf the library does not carry for this seat yet is named rather than hidden.
- Voice — the bench speaks in two voices rather than twenty. The women share the voice Vera speaks in and the men share the second, so a seat is recognisable on a line where nobody can see a face.
- What next — the close at the foot of the directory and of every seat's record, so neither screen dead-ends. The directory offers the call room, the closest renewals, Staff the room, the library the bench reads from, and the negotiation plan. A seat's moves run with that person already chosen: a vendor negotiator links straight to your placement for that vendor in the Benchmark Library, and every seat except the vendor's chair offers a rehearsal against her before the real call.
How to use it
- Open Specialists. If your workspace tracks agreements, the seats with a live renewal behind them are already leading.
- In Staff the room, pick the kind of call, the vendor, and how hard you want to push. Read the room it draws and the one line under each seat saying why it is there.
- Open a seat's profile and read How they work and In the room. That is the part that decides whether you want them on a live call.
- Check the briefing pack for what the seat actually holds today. Anything marked In preparation is on the bench roadmap and is not pretending otherwise.
- Press Bring them to a call. The seat is saved as a call setup for the whole workspace.
- Open the call room and pick that setup from your saved chips. Nobody joins anything until you start the call and send them in.
- On a meeting, send the seat in as you would send Vera. It introduces itself by name, answers on its own ground, and speaks in the seat's own voice. When the call ends, the debrief memo names who advised you.
Tips
- Four seats is the ceiling on one call. A fifth voice stops being a bench and starts being a crowd, and you are the one chairing it.
- Setting the stance to push adds the vendor's chair to the room rather than making another seat louder. Rehearse against their playbook before you use the hard version on a real call.
- A seat is not a licence to invent. Everything a vendor seat says about that vendor still comes from your documents, the tools, or the research library, and where it does not have something it says so and names what to ask for.
- The seat never loosens the rules of the room. It still speaks only when you release it, still looks up every figure before saying it out loud, and still does not know your walk-away. Where the seat and the room's rules disagree, the room wins.
- A call with no specialist behaves exactly as it always did.
Related: The call room · Major renewals · Research
The Deal File (preview)
The whole negotiation rendered as one case file, in the same voice as a Second Opinion: a dark stage, a white executive brief per page, and a Put it to work rail. Six pages, walked in order or jumped by tab, with the arrow keys paging when nothing else has focus. This preview runs on the anonymized sample renewal, so it opens straight into the worked Adobe file with nothing to upload; the panel links through to Second Opinion, where your own contract is the one that gets read.
On the screen
- The file rail (left) — the six pages numbered in reading order with open and read markers, search across the file, and the seats at the table. Offer a seat brings a teammate into the same file on the same page.
- The paper (center) — one executive brief per page: the benchmark Brief, which opens on the discount you hold, the band comparable buyers land in, and where that ranks, the Research dossier where you tick your leverage directly in the table, the Drafts pack of five letters, the line by line Compare table with a strike button on every row, the Redline with adopt or hold on each clause, and the Mandate ready for sign-off.
- The what-if desk (right) — scope, term, and ambition dials plus three what-if pills. Every page reprices as you move it: the ask marker on the brief, the numbers in the letters, the mandate table.
- Put it to work (right, below the desk) — page-specific moves: the five drafts, copy the one line verdict, send the markup to legal, route the mandate for sign-off.
How to use it
- Open the file from the negotiation desk and read the brief; the gold marker is the ask the file argues for.
- Move the what-if desk until the target is one you would defend on a call, then tick your real leverage on page 2.
- Pick the opening email on page 3, copy it, and send it from your own inbox; nothing sends from the platform.
- Strike the indefensible lines on page 4, decide all six redlines on page 5, and route page 6 for sign-off.
The file autosaves in your browser: leave whenever, and it reopens on the same page with every number held.
Related: Major renewals · Second opinion · Vera AI - Ghost Writer
Vera AI - Ghost Writer
The correspondence desk for every vendor conversation you are running, in the shape of the mail client the work actually happens in. A drafting box is right for one email and wrong for the eight weeks after it, where the negotiation is a thread: what they sent, what you sent, what you nearly sent, and what to send now.
The three panes. Down the left are folders, worked out from the record rather than stored, so they can never disagree with the thread: Needs a reply (they spoke last), All conversations, Waiting on them (you spoke last), and Closed. Above them, type a vendor name to open a new conversation, or press one that already exists. The middle column lists the conversations, newest first, each showing the last thing said and a Needs a reply mark when the ball is with you. The right pane is the conversation itself: every message in order, yours and theirs, with Vera's read printed underneath each of their messages, the tactic named and the play she would run against it.
The composer. Underneath the thread. Paste what they sent adds their message to the conversation and reads it, against everything already said rather than on its own, so a number they are quietly repeating or a concession they are walking back is visible. Then pick an angle and Vera drafts: Hold the position (concede nothing, make them move next), Ask, do not bid (spend questions instead of money), Bring the alternative forward, The budget ceiling, Offer two packages (two shapes you value equally, so their choice reveals their constraint), or Close it out (narrow to what is open and collect the end-game asks).
The tone, on its own row under the angles, is a separate decision: the angle is what the email argues, the tone is how it sounds. Direct is the standard register, plain and businesslike. Warm is collegial, for a relationship you intend to keep; the warmth is in the wrapping only, so it concedes nothing a cold email would have held. Formal is measured and written to be read by people who were not in the conversation, for an email that will be forwarded, escalated, or attached to the file. Firm is cool and short, for a thread that has stalled: what is not working, what you need, and what happens if it does not arrive. Pressing one rewrites the draft in that register with the position unchanged, and the tone rides every rewrite and saves with the draft. She works out where the negotiation stands from the record itself, probe, anchor, trade, or converge, and writes to that phase, and every draft is written against what is known about how that particular publisher negotiates and where its fiscal year sits. What this draft is doing appears above the email, for your eyes only: what it concedes, what it refuses, and the one thing to hold. Ask Vera for a rewrite takes plain English ("shorter and firmer", "hold the number", "ask for their final paper") and rewrites what is on screen, so edits you made by hand survive.
Drafts are kept. Save the draft keeps it as edited, so leaving the desk does not lose it. Every draft Vera wrote lists the whole history for that conversation, each with the angle and tone it took, when it was written, and a sent mark on the one that actually went, and Put it back in the composer restores any of them, in the voice it was written in. I sent this records that you sent it from your own inbox: it joins the thread as an outbound message, and every later draft reads against it.
Nothing sends from here. The platform never mails a vendor from this desk. You copy the draft or open it in your own email app, and the desk records what left. If you would rather work the thread from your inbox entirely, Vera AI - Ghost Writer by email in the left rail sets up a private agent address you forward vendor mail to.
Related: Major renewals · The benchmark library · Workflow agents · Mail
Your own correspondence desk: every email the platform drafts for you, filed in one mailbox. Where the Ghost Writer holds one vendor negotiation as a thread the deal team can see, Mail is personal. It carries everything, the benchmark you are forwarding to your CFO, the note going back to a vendor, the reply you asked Vera to read first, wherever in the platform it started.
Mail opens as its own window: press it in the rail, the envelope in the top bar, or any link to it, and the desk arrives in one frame, folders, list and letter, with nothing loading behind it. The title bar carries Maximize, the sun and moon that flips the whole account between light and dark, and Close, and closing the window returns you to Home.
*In plain words: the mail client for everything Vera writes you, and it remembers.*
The three panes. Down the left are the folders: Inbox for mail you brought in, All correspondence, Sent, Drafts, To vendors and Internal split by who the reader is, and Trash. Under them, Renewal files lists the renewals you track, each showing how many chains you have filed into it. The middle column lists the mail, grouped Today, This week and Earlier, each row showing the reader, the subject, the first line, whether it is a draft or sent, an External mark when the reader is outside your company, and the document the draft was grounded on. The right pane is the letter itself, with everyone it went to, its attachments, and the actions along the bottom.
Writing one. New email offers the sources the desk can write from, then opens the composer: a reader rail on the left, the letter in the middle, and the figures behind it on the right. Pick who it is for and the angle and guardrails follow the reader; an email to a vendor keeps your internal targets and your walk-away out of the text. Add recipients in To, Cc and Bcc; anyone you have written to before completes as you type.
Your defaults, set once. The sliders in the composer's title bar hold the tone, the length, long, medium or short, your signature, and whether you write in plain text, rich text or html. Every new draft starts there, and the controls in the rail still change any single email without disturbing the default. The signature replaces the draft's sign off rather than stacking under it.
Attachments are real files. Attach takes anything from your computer up to 25 MB, or a contract, report or export from your workspace. You can also paste a screenshot straight into the letter. Files are stored privately and open through a link that expires after a minute, so an attachment is something the reader can actually open rather than a name on a list.
Reading their email first. Analyze a response takes an email you paste in, and Vera reads it before writing anything: the figures they put in writing, the dates they named, and the questions they asked, each with what it means for your position. Add a steer in your own words, "keep it short and firm", and the reply is written to it. The read stays beside the letter while you edit.
Filing it into a renewal. Save to a renewal puts a whole chain into a contract record, where the case and any negotiation on that renewal carry it as context. This is the one action that shares an email: your mailbox is otherwise yours alone, colleagues cannot read it, and a blind copy is never carried across when a chain is filed.
Sending it. Copy offers Copy for Outlook, which keeps your paragraphs, live links and inline screenshots when you paste, or plain text; Open in your mail app hands the draft to your own client. Nothing goes to a vendor from the platform without you sending it.
Related: Vera AI - Ghost Writer · Agreements · Renewals
Cases
Case Mode: every agent-run deal as one complete record, with the worklist sorted needs-you first and one rule throughout: a case holds at most one pending human decision at any moment.
*In plain words: Vera runs the negotiation; you approve the goal and decide every offer.*
When to reach for this
- The tail vendors nobody has time to negotiate: Automated mode runs them without a strategy review each.
- A deal that matters but not enough for your own calendar: Guided mode, with the strategy approved by you.
- Checking on a running case: the worklist is sorted so what needs you is at the top.
Your position sits in the masthead: money in motion, decisions waiting on you, saved this year from certificates, and certificates booked. The operating rule and the worked example sit in the column beside the worklist rather than under it.
On the screen
- The numbers: money in motion across open cases, decisions waiting, savings booked from case certificates, and certificates issued. Every number clicks through to the cases behind it.
- The worklist: every case with its annual value, stage (Your decision, You have the wheel, Agent negotiating, Setup, Closed), who the case is waiting on and for how long ("Vendor · 3d", "You · 2h"), the predicted close date with its basis, and the next action. Filter by stage with the chips above the table. When a vendor has been silent for 3 days or more, the row grows a Have Vera follow up button: one click and she sends a polite chase, you on CC. The worklist also states who owns each deal: a row where you took the wheel links straight to its Major renewals thread.
- The case record: a status path across the top (Setup, Agent negotiating, Your decision, Closed; gold "You have the wheel" when you take over), the metadata grid, then Your mandate: the one panel that answers "what exactly did I authorize?" with the opening ask, target, walk-away, and leverage, a plain-language "she may / she may never" split, how she signs, who rides CC, and the exact AI disclosure sentence the vendor reads. Below it the market evidence and the case file: every email and every system action merged into one chronology (filter to Emails or Case log), sent messages edged in blue and vendor replies edged in gold, each with its addressing, timestamp, complete body, and Vera's read.
- The decision panel: when an offer stops the agent, the money leads: three tiles showing what you pay now, what the vendor offers, and what you would save or pay more, plus the vendor's offer trend across rounds so you can see the floor forming. Then the one decision: accept and close, approve and send Vera's prepared counter, or reject it and tell her what to push for so she counters the vendor again. A negotiation runs as many rounds as it takes. Accepting can carry conditions: state them and Vera sends the vendor a written acceptance confirmation, subject to your conditions, before the case closes, so the terms live in the thread. When an offer lands you also get an email that leads with the same numbers. Nothing goes to the vendor until you choose.
- Take the wheel: step in on any live case and the agent stands down entirely; work the thread yourself, then hand control back to Vera whenever you are done. Both moves are on the case log.
- The certificate: closing books a verified outcome certificate with the baseline, the accepted figure, the savings, any acceptance conditions, and the evidence counts, and it rolls into the Saved this year number. A closed case ends with next moves (start the next vendor, open the report, see the insights), never a dead end. It also shows in realized savings on the Overview lens of Portfolio.
- This deal elsewhere: one line naming the other records this deal already lives on, so a single deal stops living in four places you have to remember. There are three possible surfaces, and it names only the ones that exist: Negotiation (you drive), Case (Vera drives), and Renewal record (the paper). The record you are standing on is never listed against itself, and the same line rides the negotiation case file.
Vera AI-run Negotiation (/cases/new)
The one intake for Case Mode, with two modes at the top. Automated is the easy path for the tail (tier-3 and tier-4 vendors): pick the vendor, give the contact email, and launch, and Vera benchmarks the discount, writes the opening email, and runs the negotiation on her own with no strategy to review. Guided is for the deals that matter: you review and approve the strategy, the asks, and the opening email per vendor before anything sends. Both copy you on every email and stop for your decision on any formal offer.
The first visit plays the Case Mode introduction (/cases/intro): an eight-scene, full-screen walkthrough of how a case runs, from intake to the certificate, with the control model spelled out (you approve the goal, she negotiates, you decide every offer). The product screenshots carry each page; click any of them (or the Enlarge control) to view it near full screen, and press Escape to return. Replay it any time from How Case Mode works in the Cases header. Finish with "Do not show this again" ticked and it never interrupts again.
In either mode you tick a vendor already on file (each row carries a colored vendor monogram so long lists scan fast), add one by hand, or drop new contracts (single files or whole folders; the drop zone accounts for every file: added, failed, or skipped for type), and supply the vendor's sales or renewals email by typing it or by pasting a signature or email thread. The paste box shows what it found ("Found [email protected] · Dana Reyes") before you commit it. As each row lands, Vera reads the market for that vendor and states it in dollars: the published discount band, and what your target percent is worth per year against your current spend ("At your 10% target that is $32,000 a year off the table"), with a nudge when your target sits below what buyers typically get. A summary line under the guardrails totals the whole launch. The screen also shows the exact AI disclosure sentence the vendor will read, word for word, and warns you if a CC address sits on the vendor's own domain. Up to 10 cases launch at once; the counter is on the screen. Your mode, guardrails, sender name, and CC list are remembered for the next launch, and once your org has launched its first case the big explainer folds away into a one-line header.
The launch is live. After you press launch, each case plays its opening on screen: benchmarked, strategy set, first email in the vendor's inbox, then the actual email that went out, readable in full, with the sender name the vendor sees. The headline states the target on the table in dollars across everything you launched. Failed rows list their reason with a Fix these and relaunch shortcut. In Guided mode you then press Prepare the strategy with Vera: she benchmarks where you sit versus the market (the discount read), drafts a high-level negotiation strategy that uses real competitive tension (naming credible alternatives so the vendor has to stay price competitive), sets the opening ask, the internal target, and the walk-away, lists the prioritized asks as tick boxes (defaults are pre-ticked; untick what you do not want), and writes the opening email. The plan also states how she will play the rounds: the concession plan (steps that shrink round over round so the vendor reads the floor), what she finds out from the vendor before conceding anything, and, when talks would fail, the credible alternative as a costed path (If talks fail). Review and edit any of it, including the email itself, then approve; the approved plan becomes the mandate every one of her emails is checked against. The owner's authorization launches every prepared selection at once. How the email works is spelled out on the screen: Vera sends through VendorBenchmark's secure relay so vendor replies route back to her, the vendor sees your sender name (not VendorBenchmark), and you are copied at your real inbox on every message.
How Vera negotiates. Before every strategy and every counter she reads the VendorBenchmark research for the moment at hand (the vendor's Negotiation Toolkit, the Negotiation Craft doctrine, Renewal Outlooks, audit defense manuals, exit runbooks), so a quarter-end squeeze or an audit-as-leverage play gets the researched counter. She computes the vendor's offer trend across rounds (shrinking moves mean the floor is near), recognizes the rep from your prior threads and the plays they favor, knows the vendor's fiscal year and quarter closes and deliberately slows her pace into them, and never gives without getting: every concession is paired with an ask, on the shrinking curve you approved. Before any email goes out unattended, a seller-side check reads the draft the way the vendor's account team would; anything exploitable is parked in your approval queue with the findings attached. And a negotiation that reaches ten vendor rounds without landing stops and asks you to converge or walk, with a prepared next move waiting.
Editing what Vera sends. You can edit any email before it goes out: the opening email in the prepare step, and every counter Vera drafts (open the case, use Edit on the prepared counter, then approve to send exactly what you see). The AI-agent disclosure is always kept on the opening email even if you remove it.
If the first email has not gone out. A case only reads as "Agent negotiating" once the opening email has actually been sent. If a case shows "Setup · not started" with the next action "First email not sent yet", open it and use Send the first email now; if delivery fails you will see exactly why.
Insights (/cases/insights)
The management view leads with the number a leader repeats: verified savings a year across closed cases, on a navy banner. Below it: money in motion, decisions waiting, median cycle time, and the agent's email activity, with pipeline-by-stage and savings-by-month charts you can click into, and a table of every case with its predicted close date and basis. Board deck exports the whole portfolio as a three-slide PowerPoint in the executive-brief theme (the numbers, then every case), ready to drop into a board pack unedited; the portfolio report is one click away too.
Email that keeps you current. A weekly Your cases digest lands Monday morning when you have open cases: money in motion, decisions waiting, savings booked, and the worklist, decisions first. And the first time a vendor replies on a case you get a short note with the vendor's message, Vera's read, and her next step, so you never wonder whether the machine is working.
Reports
Every case has a report (/cases/[id]/report): the mandate, the full correspondence, Vera's reads, and the outcome, as an executive brief you can export and forward. The portfolio report (/cases/report) is everything Vera ran across every case in one brief.
How to use it
- Open Cases and work top down; the list already puts what needs you first.
- On a setup case, review the mandate table and approve it in place; that approval is the agent's written authorization.
- When a decision is waiting, read the correspondence log first, then send the counter or accept and close.
- To steer a live thread yourself, take the wheel on the case, work it, then hand it back to Vera.
- Use Full deal thread on any case to drop into the complete negotiation workspace with every tool.
Tips
- Cases are the same deals as Major renewals, read as records; anything you do in either place shows in both.
- The sender name and CC list you choose at launch apply to every email Vera sends on that case, not just the first.
Related: Major renewals · Competitive Quotes · Renewals
Competitive Quotes
Autonomous multi-vendor quote runs: hand Vera a set of vendors, the tier-4 tail is the sweet spot, and she runs every quote conversation herself, so the vendors effectively compete for your business in parallel.
On the screen
- The launcher — up to 10 vendor rows, each with the vendor, the rep's contact email, a one-line scope ("25 seats, renews October"), and the current annual spend if you know it. Guardrails are set once for the run: the target reduction, the walk-away ceiling, and optional notes for the agent.
- The authorization — the launch checkbox is the written mandate approval the agent cites to vendors. Owners only, and the approved mandate is recorded per vendor in the audit log.
- What Vera does — introduces herself to each rep as your declared AI agent, requests a formal written quote, negotiates the back-and-forth inside the mandate, and politely chases silence. You are copied on every email she sends.
- The offer gate — the moment a vendor puts a formal offer on the table, the agent stops, notifies you, and waits. No offer is ever accepted without your explicit approval on the deal thread. A What next panel rides the moment: review the offer, escalate the run to a case, or ask Vera about the spread across the board.
- The board — every run with its state: quote requested, Vera negotiating, proposal awaiting your decision, paused, or closed, with sent and received counts and a link into each thread.
How to use it
- Open Competitive Quotes from the negotiation desk and add your tail vendors with their rep emails.
- Set the target reduction and the walk-away ceiling, tick the authorization, and launch.
- Watch the CC'd emails arrive, and act only when the board says a proposal needs your decision.
Tips
- Give each row a real scope line and the current spend; the agent's opening ask is built word for word from what you enter, never generated.
Related: Major renewals · Approvals
Buying blocs
Buyers with the same vendor and the same renewal window, negotiating on one term sheet. You stay anonymous until mutual opt-in.
Your position sits in the masthead: invitations waiting on your answer, blocs you have joined, how many buyers are in them, and the combined annual value those buyers carry into the same window. That last figure is the whole argument for a bloc, so it leads.
On the screen
- Matchmaking strip — where your renewal calendar lines up with other buyers of the same vendor.
- Invitations — a bloc you have been invited to: you see the shape (buyers, combined ACV, window, term sheet version), never the members.
- Your blocs — blocs you have joined, with a room to coordinate the shared negotiation.
How to use it
- Review the matchmaking strip and your invitations.
- Open an invitation to read the bloc's shape and thesis.
- Join a bloc to enter its room; identities unlock only on mutual opt-in after you join.
Tips
- Blocs form around vendor families where several buyers renew in the same quarter, built on a shared Fair Renewal Rider term sheet.
Related: Fair Renewal Rider · Renewals
Clause library
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you move between them without going back out, and Escape closes the window.
Your organization's negotiation positions per clause, worked like a desk: the playbook rail on the left, the selected position as a one-page dossier in the center, and the live contract's verdict on the right. These positions feed the AI engines, so scans and drafts argue for your standard instead of a generic one.
This is the same playbook you see under Settings › Clause positions, viewed from the negotiating side, and each page now states its role and links the other: this workspace compares contracts and drafts redlines, while Settings › Clause positions holds the must-have template Coverage sweeps. Every workspace starts with the VendorBenchmark starter library already in place, so the page has positions to grade against from day one; edit them to match your own standard.
The starter positions match the spend category you are working in. Most of the library is universal and every desk gets it: a renewal uplift cap, a termination right, a liability cap, a data processing addendum and payment terms are as necessary on a catering contract as on a licence. What changes is the rest. A facilities desk starts with indexation capped and evidenced, ancillary charges named and capped, a true down with the site, variable works competed above a threshold and the exit priced before entry. Professional services starts with the rate card fixed for the term and the grade mix committed with it. Marketing starts with the fee separated from media and rebates belonging to the client. Workforce starts with the markup stated separately from the pay rate. Travel starts with last room availability. MRO starts with list price movement capped. Logistics starts with accessorials named and the fuel surcharge on a stated formula. Information Technology and Software keeps every position it had, including the ones only software needs, such as the uptime credit and the licence audit true up, which no longer appear on the other seven desks. Restore adds the positions for the desk you are on, and never overwrites an edit.
Each position is written as language you can paste: what to ask for, what to accept instead, what to walk away from, and why it matters. The category positions are drawn from the levers recorded in the curve documents behind those suppliers' benchmarks, so they argue what that market actually argues.
*In plain words: what your organization signs, written down once, argued for everywhere.*
When to reach for this
- Setting the standard, once, so every later review argues for your language instead of generic language.
- Before signature: compare the draft against your positions and see the deviations named.
- When the same clause fight keeps repeating: a recorded fallback ends the relitigating.
A worked example. Set an uplift cap position (preferred: 4 percent indexed; fallback: 5 percent; walk-away: no cap, no signature) and compare the sample Contoso Analytics quote against it: the quote names no cap at all, so the comparison flags the silence and drafts your pre-approved language as the redline. One position, recorded once, catches the same gap in every future contract.
On the screen
- The playbook — the left rail lists every position grouped by area; its header states how many of the eight standard areas carry one, and names any area with no position, because a comparison cannot grade a clause you have taken no position on. Once a contract is compared, each clause carries its grade as a colored dot: green meets your standard, red weaker, gold missing, gray unclear.
- Draft the playbook from your paper — pick up to three indexed contracts and the agent drafts positions from the language those contracts actually achieved: category, title, preferred and fallback language, the walk-away, and a line naming exactly which contract each position is grounded in. Nothing enters the library on its own; you approve or dismiss each proposal one at a time, and the card counts your positions against the cap of 40. Contracts that are not indexed yet are named so you can index them first.
- The dossier — the selected position as a one-page brief: your position, your preferred language, the acceptable fallback, the walk-away, and why the position holds. Every section carries a copy action, so the wording is one press from a redline.
- Against the live deal — pick a contract on the right and run the comparison. The rail grades the selected clause, quotes the language the AI found in the document, and drafts the redline from your preferred language, with the deal scorecard beneath.
- What next — the sweep closes with its next moves: copy every drafted redline in one block for the negotiation thread, start the negotiation, open Vera Deal-Room, or ask Vera which redline to push hardest for.
How to use it
- Select a clause in the playbook rail and read its dossier. Add or edit positions from the rail; each carries a name, a category, your position in plain English, and optionally the precedent wording, the fallback, and the walk-away.
- If the rail header names an area with no position, add one before comparing.
- Pick a contract on the right and run the comparison, then click through the graded dots to read each clause's verdict and its redline.
- See position coverage across all contracts on Coverage.
Related: Coverage · Clause positions (Settings)
Rights register
*In plain words: both sides of every contract's obligations, harvested. The rights you hold, with their expiry windows watched, and the duties you owe, with their deadlines named.*
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, and Escape closes the window.
When to reach for this
- Before spending negotiating capital on something the paper already grants: true-downs, swap windows, price holds.
- Planning an exit: transition assistance and data-return rights are leverage you own (the sunset recipe).
- When a right is about to expire unused: the watchdog's alert is this page working.
- Before a payment deadline, a usage report, or a true-up notification falls due: the duties table names the date and the clause.
Everyone benchmarks the price; this page harvests the whole obligation picture. A quote-anchored pass reads each contract and records both sides: the rights you hold (true-downs, swap windows, price holds, SLA credits, benchmark and termination clauses) with their exercise windows, and the duties you owe (payment deadlines, usage reporting, true-up notifications, minimum commitments, insurance proofs) with their stated dates. The weekly watchdog alerts you when a right is about to expire unused; duties are marked Met or Missed on the register itself.
On the screen
- Rights you hold — every harvested right, its status, and the exact clause it was read from, so you can act with the contract in hand.
- Duties you owe — a dense table of your own obligations: the deadline, the stated amount where the paper prints one, and the clause each was read from. Duties falling due inside 90 days are counted at the top.
- Owner — every right and duty can carry an owner from your roster, so a window is somebody's window. Assigning is one select; viewers see the name.
- Harvest stats — active rights and duties, contracts scanned, and how many are still pending a harvest.
- Right families — before anything is harvested, the kinds of right and duty the harvester looks for, plus the one step that unlocks the register.
- What next — under the register, the next moves. The featured move is a pre-drafted, clause-quoting letter for the next closing window: an exercise letter for a right, a performance confirmation for a duty. The rest follow: open the clause behind the window, start the negotiation with that vendor, ask Vera which expiring right is worth most, or book the analyst to sequence the windows.
How to use it
- Upload contracts and let Document Agent read them (it reads on its own, and Read them now under the papers not searchable yet starts the rest), then harvest here.
- Work the rights with a near expiry so nothing you paid for lapses unused.
- Give every duty inside 90 days an owner; a deadline without a name is how a commitment gets missed.
Related: Document Agent · Clause library
Coverage
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you move between them without going back out, and Escape closes the window.
The board says when it is stale: contracts added since the last sweep, or a must-have template edited since, show as a badge on the stage with the run control beside it, and an outdated report tab offers its regenerate button. Nothing reruns without your press.
Your clause library's must-have template, swept across every contract: which agreements carry your required protections, and which do not.
*In plain words: your non-negotiables, checked against every contract at once.*
When to reach for this
- After setting the clause standard: the sweep is what turns positions into findings.
- Before a renewal: a red Missing cell on a renewing agreement is a negotiation item with a deadline.
- When leadership asks "are we protected?": the coverage report is the written answer.
Before the first sweep, the stage does not draw an empty grid. It states what it is about to do, lists the protections your template requires below it, and offers one action: Run the first sweep. Nothing is graded until something has been read.
On the screen
- The verdict stage — the page opens on a navy stage, the same language as Second Opinion: one sentence on how many swept contracts are missing a protection you require, four figures counting up beneath it (fully covered, carrying a gap, gaps in total, and posture, the share of checked cells carried), and the page's actions: run the sweep, generate the report, edit the template. The template edit links say where they lead: Settings › Clause positions, where the must-have template lives.
- The sweep theatre — Run coverage check raises a fullscreen stage where the sweep plays live: position lines tick in as the portfolio is read, a gold arc tracks the real batches, and when the verdicts land the completion line types itself. Esc or the corner button lowers the stage at any time; the sweep keeps running behind it and the stage offers Watch the sweep live to return.
- The board tab — the protections rail on the left lists every must-have weakest first with a coverage bar; selecting one turns the ledger into that protection's story: one row per agreement with the finding the sweep recorded and its verdict pill, worst first. Expand a row for the evidence in full: the finding, the exact clause quoted from the document, and what your template requires. All protections shows every agreement with a verdict square per position (✓ present, ~ deviates, ✕ missing, ? unclear, · not checked) and a gap count; click any square to follow that protection. Verdict filter chips, a search box, and a worst first or vendor A to Z sort work the board.
- The By protection tab — the ranked read: the coverage ring, then every protection weakest first with its bar and counts. Opening a row shows the template language it grades against and the agreements missing it, each one press from its contract.
- The report tab — the white-paper read of where your protections are strong and where they are missing. If no report exists yet, this tab writes one; regenerating from the stage lands here.
- What next — when the sweep finds missing must-have protections, a What next panel targets the worst-exposed vendor: open its renewal, start a case on it, ask Vera about the exposure, or draft the redline from your clause library.
How to use it
- Run the sweep and watch it play, or lower the stage and keep working. Only contracts with indexed text can be read; the scope line says how many are waiting.
- Read the stage first, then the protections rail on the board: the top entry is the protection your portfolio is thinnest on.
- Select that protection and work the ledger from the top, expanding rows to read the clause each verdict rests on. Press the Missing chip to isolate the agreements with no responsive clause at all.
- Open the contract from any row to fix it, or generate the report for the narrative summary.
Tips
- The must-have template lives under Settings › Clause positions, so keep those positions current first; the Clause library workspace is where you compare contracts against them and draft redlines.
Related: Clause library
Fair Renewal Rider
The standard addendum buyers attach to every software renewal: an indexed uplift cap, benchmark repricing, audit conduct rules, no retroactive true-ups, co-termination, and change of control protection. Versioned, public, and free to send.
*In plain words: the standard protections, as one attachment, so you never negotiate them clause by clause.*
When to reach for this
- Every renewal, as a matter of habit: the rider rides along without spending negotiating capital.
- A contract with a structural gap: the sample Contoso quote carries no uplift cap, and the rider's indexed cap is the ready-made fix.
- Short on time: at two weeks out, one attachment carrying six protections beats six separate asks (the rescue play).
On the screen
- Adoption counter — how many real renewals carry the rider through VendorBenchmark. A standard works because everyone asks for the same thing.
- Open the workroom — the band above the adoption counter opens the rider as a six document workroom: the cover sheet, the operative language of all six clauses, the rationale brief in three clause families, a risk register pricing each missing protection in the rider's own words, the vendor facing send sheet, and a What now sheet. ⚡ What now drafts the cover note that transmits the rider, copies the full text, downloads either edition, and opens your renewals, the negotiation dossier, or the clause library. The standard edition is what goes to the vendor; the negotiator's edition, with the fallback ladders and the push backs already countered, stays on your side. ✦ Ask Vera answers from the rider's published text, including what you will hear on each clause and the counter to it.
- Generator — pick the contract that is renewing and the rider comes back as a ready-to-send Word document with the parties and renewal date filled in, or, when the vendor's paper on file is a DOCX, as tracked-change insertions inside their own document.
- Reading room — the rider itself, every clause annotated with why it is fair, the fallback tiers, and the vendor objection countered.
- Clause changelog — what changed in each version of the rider.
- What next — after you download the rider, a What next panel points to the renewal it attaches to and copies the send sheet cover note for your own mail.
How to use it
- Read the rider in the reading room to understand each clause.
- Pick the renewing contract in the generator and choose the edition.
- Download the Word document or the tracked-change redline and attach it to your renewal.
Related: Renewals · Buying blocs
Vault
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you move between them without going back out, and Escape closes the window.
A room is an access layer, not a second store: every document in one also sits in Contracts, and renewal terms stay on the agreement ledger.
One workspace over your governed document store, in the same voice as Second Opinion: a navy stage on every page. Projects group documents by matter, for example an acquisition review, and each project is org-wide or limited to named people; documents in a restricted project stay hidden from everyone else.
The front door opens on the stage: your estate in a sentence, documents, rooms, the share read and ready for AI work, encrypted megabytes on file, with a chip for every room. Each chip is a door into that room's own page; a lock marks a restricted room. Three estate-wide tabs sit under the stage: every document across the vault, the coverage matrix across rooms, and every room with its access level.
A room's own page carries its stage: the room's name, its figures, and the drop target. Drag documents or whole folders onto the stage and each file is validated by signature, malware scanned, deduplicated, and indexed automatically; the add existing and cloud import moves (Box, Google Drive, SharePoint) sit beside it as stage buttons. The same three tabs follow below, scoped to the room.
- Documents — the room's documents with type, size, state, and per row remove.
- Coverage — a vendor by document role matrix built from what the read stage has named: master agreements, order forms, amendments, statements of work. A vendor holding supporting paper with no governing agreement on file is flagged as a gap; papers not yet read for a role sit in the Untyped column rather than being guessed at. The read below the matrix turns the flags into sentences, starting with the missing agreements, which in diligence are usually the first document request.
- Access & policy — who can see the room, straight from the database: on a restricted room, the creator and each named member with what their organization role lets them do; on an org-wide room, everyone by role. Under it, the handling policy in plain rows: intake checks, encryption, 60 second signed URL downloads, the audit trail, and the note that Redress analysts read rooms to produce your benchmarks, on the same audit trail.
- What next — the close at the foot of the page, running on this vault's own documents: the vendors holding supporting paper with no governing agreement behind it, named; anything stored but not yet read, so it cannot be searched or benchmarked; records on the ledger with no file behind them; and the moves that put the estate to work, a diligence run across every room, a new room for the next matter, an access review, or Vera with the vault loaded as the question.
How to use it
- Create a project and pick org-wide or restricted access.
- Open its chip and drop documents on the room's stage, in bulk if needed; each file moves from received to indexed on its own.
- Read the Coverage tab and request whatever the gap flags say is missing.
- Run diligence across a project when you want the deal-grade review.
Related: Diligence
Diligence
Since August 2026 it opens as a Fluent window with its own menu: the rail inside lists the rest of Contracts & documents, so you move between them without going back out, and Escape closes the window.
End-to-end document review for a deal: every contract in scope is read for change of control, assignment, exclusivity, termination, liability, and data terms, then assembled into a risk register and an analyst report.
On the screen
- Scope picker — run the review across all contracts or limit it to one vault project.
- Risk register — every finding with its severity and the clause it rests on.
- Analyst report — the synthesized read: what needs consent or renegotiation before the deal, and what is clean.
- Open the workroom — once a review exists, a navy band above the report binds it into a numbered workroom: the cover sheet, the scope sheet, findings by area, a severity ranked risk atlas, the open questions sheet, and a What now paper. ⚡ What now drafts the internal deal owner briefing and a neutral counterparty information request from this review's own findings and open questions, copies the findings summary or the one line verdict, opens a Vera Deal-Room, and links back to the flagged records. ✦ Ask Vera is grounded on this review, so a question about what is still unresolved is answered from the review's own open items.
- What next — the review ends with a What next panel built around the top risk: open a case on that counterparty, draft the sends in the workroom, ask Vera about the worst flag, or copy the one line verdict.
How to use it
- Scope the documents into a vault project first, or run across all contracts.
- Run a diligence review.
- Work the risk register, starting with the highest-severity findings.
Related: Vault
Requests
One front door for new spend, and since August 2026 it is a room inside the sourcing desk rather than a page of its own: /requests and every old link land in the window on the intake room. Every request is read against what you already own, stamped with a verdict, and routed into sourcing, renewals, or approvals without leaving the desk.
*In plain words: everyone asks here, Vera checks what you already own, and nothing gets bought twice.*
When to reach for this
- Standing up the intake habit: one door, one triage, no side-channel purchases.
- A request arrived: the verdict (net-new, renewal, duplicate, over threshold) decides the route in seconds.
- Someone is about to buy what the estate already owns: the leak board is this room paying for itself.
In the room
- Raise a request — the form at the top of the room: what is being asked for, the vendor if known, the rough annual cost, and why. If your org shaped the intake form, its extra questions appear here too, required ones enforced. Vera triages it against the estate on arrival.
- The requester's receipts — filing a request sends the requester a receipt with a personal status link (no sign in needed), and a second email when the request is routed or reviewed. "Where is my request" stops being a conversation.
- The leak board — what was requested against what the estate already owns, priced, in the triage's own words.
- Verdicts and routing — each request carries its verdict pill and one press takes the recommended route: open a sourcing project, send it to the renewal desk, or send it to approval. Triage it again re-reads a request after the facts change. A request past the triage SLA turns its pill red, and the nightly watch tells the org's owners.
- The mail-in address — owners switch it on under Settings › Integrations and teammates email requests straight in, already stamped.
- Shape the intake form — owners add up to 12 questions of their own (free text or yes and no, optional or required); the answers travel into the triage and onto the request record.
How to use it
- Raise a request for the new spend, or let it arrive by mail.
- Read the verdict and the leak board.
- Take the recommended route, in place.
Related: Sourcing
Sourcing
Sourcing opens as the sourcing desk: one Fluent window with fifteen rooms over the whole pipeline, reading the same rows as the stage pages. Number keys 1 to 9 reach the first nine rooms, one search crosses projects, suppliers, bids and requests, and Escape closes the window. The pages beneath the desk wear the same glass: the project record and the deal desk each draw their own Fluent window with the desk rail as their menu, every entry opening that project's room, so no sourcing surface is a plain web page. The desk also keeps the record: every action lands on the project timeline, letters send from the emails room and are logged, and the award rides the approvals trail.
*In plain words: the buying pipeline, from the question to the award, one room per stage.*
When to reach for this
- A net-new purchase big enough to deserve a process (intake to award, the bake-off).
- Mid-process, when "what do I do next?" has a computed answer: every room closes with its real next moves.
- The evaluation endgame: the matrix, the pricing walk, and the target lever are what you walk into the decision with.
The rooms
- The floor — every project on one runway, from the day it opened to its response deadline, today as the gold line, with the budget riding each bar; the project cards lead with their computed next move, and the shared notes wall keeps the desk's memory underneath.
- Intake — one front door for new spend, inside the desk: raise a request or let it arrive by mail, the leak board prices what the estate already owns, and the recommended route is one press, all without leaving the room (see Requests). Every waiting request wears its clock against your triage SLA (24 hours unless your org sets otherwise), a request past it turns its pill red, and a request above your spend approval line says so on its meta line. Org owners can shape the intake form in place: up to 12 extra questions (free text or yes and no, optional or required) that appear on every raised request and travel into the triage.
- Requirements — the weighted categories with the mandatory gates marked, and the weight sliders as a what if: drag one and the scoring room re ranks live, without changing the signed set. The room also carries the sign-offs (named, dated records on the requirements and the RFP, and where the org's policy requires one, invitations refuse to send until it exists) and Upload a ready-made one: bring your own RFP, RFI or RFQ as a PDF or DOCX and the portal serves your paper verbatim to every bidder, with your standing protections still appended; drafting with Vera stays one press away, and either can replace the other at any time.
- Research, Suppliers, Proposals — the field Vera read with a fit against price map once bids are priced, the long list with who has responded and who is silent, and each bid as filed against the response clock. A supplier whose entry in the risk register is elevated or worse wears a risk chip on the long list. Beneath the long list sits the supplier register: the org level record behind each name (the same vendor across five events is one entry), showing how many events you have run with them, their qualification standing (send the baseline questionnaire from the row; they answer it once in the portal and it stands for a year across events; you approve or reject the answers), their document shelf (file certificates, insurance and tax forms with expiry dates; a lapsed critical document blocks award until renewed), their prior performance (score each quarter on delivery, quality, commercial conduct and relationship, and the average reads on every future event's register), their classifications (diversity and sustainability tags that roll up into the floor's reporting), and demos and bake-offs: schedule a session per supplier, capture what the room saw, and fold it into the panel's scores as evidence. The proposals room carries rounds and the window (open an RFI, RFP or best and final as a first class round with its own deadline, every bidder told at the same moment, bids stamped by round; seal the window and bid contents stay withheld from every reading surface until the deadline, when they unseal simultaneously and the deferred scoring runs, with a late bid on a sealed event refused outright), the structured price sheet (define the lines once and every bidder prices the same sheet in the portal, so the totals land side by side), self-declared positions (each bidder's comply, partial or no against every published requirement, with a declared no on a must-have flagged before anyone reads a page), and addenda: issue an RFP change as a numbered addendum, every live bidder is emailed the same words at the same moment, and each acknowledgment lands on the record so the trail shows everyone priced the same request.
- Analysis, Scoring, Pricing — each bid's read (summary, strengths, risks, what to clarify), the weighted matrix with gate misses struck at every weight, and the price walk from each paper's stated list to its committed annual against the budget and the incumbent. The scoring room also carries the evaluator panel: named teammates join after declaring any conflict of interest, score each bid blind per category (nobody sees another's individual numbers), and the consensus table shows the panel average, the spread, and the AI's read beside them as one voice among several. The pricing room reads round over round: what each supplier moved between rounds, in money.
- Strategy, Emails — the plan derived from the field (best and final for the leader, the walk away kept warm, the incumbent held), and the letters the project needs drafted from the record. The letters really send now: edit every word, press Send this letter, and it goes out on the platform's own mail rail and lands in the Sent from this desk log beside the drafts, on the record for good. The award and decline letters stay held until the decision is taken.
- Evaluation, Negotiation, Award — the decision memo on one page that rewrites itself as you move the levers, the finalist's asks with paste ready language and the target lever pricing the close, then the award scenarios and the savings walk. The decision itself is an arm and confirm press in the room, and it is gated three ways: an award at or above your org's approval threshold (100,000 dollars a year unless your org sets otherwise) asks for a spend approval on the approvals trail first, raised from the same strip, and only an approved request naming that supplier unlocks the confirm; a supplier whose critical document has lapsed on the register cannot be awarded until it is renewed; and where the policy requires it, the award memo takes a named sign-off first. An adopted split scenario records as a real split award: both members on the record with their shares, one agreement opened per member, the paper gate checked for each. The recorded award then opens the agreement in the estate so the renewals calendar holds the new term from day one, and it seeds the entitlement register from the awarded price sheet lines (marked needs review, so a person confirms before anything alerts). The awarded view links straight to the agreement and closes the books: sign off the savings against a typed baseline (the incumbent's annual or the approved budget) and the record lands on the org savings ledger the invoice reconciliation later proves, and save as a template keeps the requirement set and weights for the next event in the category. Once decided, each losing bidder's decline letter becomes a debrief drafted from their own scores only: their strongest category, their gap, and their own gate misses in their own quotes, never another bidder's data.
- The room — the project's collaboration surface: a comment thread on the project where mentions notify the person named, the project timeline (every action a person, an engine, or a supplier in the portal took, newest first, desk and portal merged), the shared notes wall, one press that drafts an email briefing a teammate on the project's real figures, and project roles: name teammates as owner, evaluator or viewer on this project, and editing narrows to its owners and evaluators (org owners always pass, so a misassigned wall can never lock the org out; a viewer reads without touching).
The floor also rolls up signed savings from this desk (the kept money across signed awards, on typed baselines, from the org ledger), counts the funnel honestly (invitations sent, responded, awards recorded, participation per supplier, and the classification rollup for diversity and sustainability reporting), and, for owners, carries the sourcing policy in full (the approval thresholds and triage SLA, the minimum invitations per event, whether the RFP and the award memo require sign-offs, the spend line above which projects open sealed, and the standing protections that travel on every RFP a bidder reads) plus webhooks: register an https endpoint with a signing secret and the typed project events (opened, staged, invited, bids, rounds, unsealing, awards, agreements) POST there as JSON, HMAC signed, the seam the PO handoff and ERP supplier sync build on. The policy is enforced at every gate, not remembered.
The proposals room's rounds panel can also run a price-improvement window on a best and final: switch it on and every bidder's portal shows the anonymous leading sheet total, a re-file must be lower than their own standing total, and a filing inside the last 15 minutes extends the window 15 minutes so nobody wins by the clock. A sealed window and a price-improvement window are opposite promises (one withholds every figure until the deadline, the other publishes the leading total live), so the desk offers one at a time and refuses the combination.
The command bar carries Watch beside the search: watch a project and every timeline entry reaches your notifications (the person who opens a project watches it from the start; press again to stop). It also carries See the sample estate: one press shows the whole desk fully worked on sample data, from any room, and one press brings your own desk back. An empty pipeline offers the same door from the floor, so the desk reads the same on day one as it does mid deal. The floor also reads cycle time from the trail: average days from open to award, the slowest stage and its dwell, derived from the project timeline's own stage moves. Once a project has finished, Start from a template on the floor opens the next event with the saved requirement set, weights and brief already in place.
Behind the desk, a nightly watch minds the estate: it refreshes the supplier risk register for every org with an open project and flags a worsening rating on the affected project's timeline; notifies org owners when an intake request waits past the triage SLA or a supplier document lapses or comes inside 30 days of expiry; flags a dated milestone that slipped and a project with nothing on its timeline for a fortnight; and when a scored bid carries open clarifications, it puts one line on the timeline pointing at the drafted best and final ask in the emails room. Every nudge fires once; nothing sends itself to a supplier.
The deal desk
One live deal at a time, with every move still open to you priced from the quotes you already hold.
- What if — the moves, cheapest first, each with the annual cost, the difference against the quote on the table, the difference against the approved budget, and one line on what it takes: award as quoted, hold the supplier to the top of its own discount band, make it match a competing quote, switch to the cheaper response, or bring the deal back inside the approved budget. The move you are currently on track for is marked.
- Where each number comes from — every move carries its basis, and nothing is estimated. A quoted figure is the supplier's own annual total. A price book band figure is its list price less the discount buyers of your size actually land. A competing quote is another response in the same room. A move that cannot be traced to one of those is not shown at all.
- Headroom — the gap between the quote on the table and the best move still open, stated in money and as a share of the quote. It is the number to walk into the call with.
- The ask, drafted — each priced move drafts a vendor safe ask ready to copy: the target figure and its stated basis only, never your budget, your scores, or another bidder's name.
- The responses — what each supplier quoted, scored against your own weighted requirements, with list price, the discount that implies, and the expected band beside it. The leading response is highlighted.
- Next steps — the run in order, with everything already true of the deal marked done: the brief, the weighted requirements, the RFP, the shortlist, the bids, the scoring, and the award. A shortlist only counts as done from two suppliers, because one quote is a price and two is a negotiation.
- What next — the desk's close, under the checklist. The moves themselves rather than the run order: open the project room with its supplier, bid and requirement counts, go back to the sourcing pipeline, open the leading supplier's vendor room, start a negotiation against them, or ask Vera what to press them on before you award.
Deals sit on a switcher across the top of the desk, so you can move between them without going back to the list.
The project's What Next desk
Every project record opens with a What Next desk under the stage path: the computed next move as the headline, then the premade moves of the moment, so no step starts from a blank page.
- Send the word — Vera drafts the email each stage actually needs, from the project's live numbers: the stakeholder kickoff, the requirements review request, the supplier invitation, the Q&A broadcast (one answer, every bidder, so the process stays defensible), the chase for quiet suppliers with their names already in it, the status update, the score sanity check, the recommendation memo to the budget owner, and after award the winner note, the decline notes, the legal handover, and the CFO outcome note. Drafts are yours to edit and copy; nothing sends itself.
- Run the AI — draft or refresh the RFP, find the best suppliers in the field, score every waiting bid against the weighted requirements in one click (each score carries a quote from the bid document that justifies it), and write the evaluation memo. Buttons show what has already run, for example "All 3 bids scored".
- Go deeper — the deal desk for this project, Ask Vera, the RFP and evaluation as Word, and the contract decoder once a winner is picked.
- The supplier field report — discovery now also renders on the Suppliers tab as a forwardable executive brief: the landscape summary, market context, fit bars across the field, and one honest section per candidate with strengths, gaps, price posture, and why the score, with the Send it on drafter beneath it.
- Open the workroom — once a project has a bid, a navy band under the status path opens it as a workroom: the requirements sheet, each bid's stored figures as lettered exhibits, then once two responses are scored a verdict brief that reads the whole field in one paper (the standing, the cross bid price check against bands and the price book, and a what to do first list that prices the band and list rate asks where the stored figures can), the weighted scoring atlas as one toned table, an award brief with a verify before award list, and a What now sheet. ⚡ What now drafts the best and final ask to each finalist (priced from the stored figures where the record can price it, in position language that never names the band or another bidder), the award notification, the courteous note to the other bidders (it carries no scores), and the stakeholder update, all from the stored record, then copies the project one liner or the bid table as text and scores the responses on the record. ✦ Ask Vera answers from this project's own requirements, bids, and scores.
Send invitations, and bids that file themselves
The RFP tab carries the send flow, so the document you drafted actually travels. Pick the shortlisted suppliers, confirm each contact email, set the response deadline, preview the email, and send. You stay in charge of every send; nothing mails itself.
- Each invitation renders in the document standard with your organization named as sender, summarizes the RFP, states the deadline, and carries its own private reply address.
- The supplier's portal page carries the RFP, the yes or no on bidding, the Q&A, the message line, the response upload, and, when the project has a structured price sheet, Price the sheet: the buyer's own lines with one unit price box per line and a live total. A filed sheet lands in the desk's proposals room beside the others, a resubmission before the deadline replaces the earlier one, and the filing is written to the project timeline. The portal also carries Declare against the requirements (comply, partial or no per published requirement, with a one line note on any gap), any addenda with an acknowledge button per bidder, and the buyer's qualification questionnaire when one was sent, answered once and standing for a year across that buyer's events. Publishing a Q&A answer emails every live bidder the same words at the same moment, each on their own portal link.
- When the supplier replies with the proposal attached (PDF or DOCX, 8 MB per attachment), the response files straight onto the project: the file is signature checked, its text extracted, and it is auto scored against your weighted requirements exactly as a manual upload would be. A scanned attachment files too: it is transcribed in the background under the same daily transcription budget the archive scan uses, and scored once the text is out. The invite flips to Responded, the notes wall gets the update, and the project owner is notified. A reply with no bid file, or an attachment that cannot be read even by transcription, is flagged on the wall for a human look instead.
- The RFQ watchdog (an agent in the Agent Center) minds the window daily: each quiet bidder gets exactly one reminder, three days before the deadline, and never without a deadline on record. When every invite has answered, or the window closes, it notes the tally on the project wall and nudges you toward evaluation.
- The supplier list on the tab shows each invite's state: Sent, Reminded, Responded, with dates.
Award scenarios
The Evaluation tab ends the guesswork about weights and split awards with a panel of pure math over your stored scores and extracted line items. No AI call is spent on any of it.
- What-if weights — drag a category's slider and the scored matrix re-ranks live, with each supplier's movement against the RFP ranking marked. One click resets to the RFP weights; the weights on record never change from here.
- Where the winner flips — one line per category stating the exact weight at which rank 1 changes hands, for example "Northline overtakes Meridian if Integration weight rises above 28 percent". No line means the ranking is weight robust.
- Single award vs split — where bids carry priced line items, the panel prices every single award against the best two way split by line item group: each contested group goes to the cheaper bidder, groups only one bidder priced stay with it, and every card shows total cost, the delta against the best single award, the combined weighted score (each requirement served by the stronger member), and mandatory coverage. The math states its own limits: up to 15 line items per bid, the first 8 bids, and no modeling of bundle discounts a vendor might withdraw on a partial award.
- Adopt a scenario — saves the chosen scenario on the project and posts the one line summary to the notes wall. For a single award scenario the regular Award button sits right beside it; the award itself stays a deliberate, separate step.
How to use it
- Walk in and read the marquee; it names the project that needs you first. Click that card.
- Make the move the focus console states, or run the engine it offers.
- Press N to leave what you learned on the wall, and U to log what you did.
- Before you step away, open the Shift log and compose the End of shift handoff for your team.
- Start a new project from the backstage toolbar, or turn a purchase request into one.
Related: Requests
The sourcing spine
Folded into the sourcing desk in August 2026: every stage that used to be its own page, Requirements through Award, is a room in the desk window now, and the old addresses (/sourcing/requirements, /sourcing/scoring, and the rest) land in the window on the right room with the active project carried along. The rooms carry the stages' engines in place: draft the RFP, run the research, add a vendor, upload a proposal, read and score the bids, write the memo, and take the award decision with a confirm press. The project record keeps the deep edits, the papers, and the exports.
The Negotiation Workflow
One deal walked from the number to the emails that close it: four acts, each named as the question you are actually asking, all dressed like the home page. The panel beside the rail lists all four in order under their act names, so where you are in the deal is the same on the panel as it is on the page. The workflow remembers the deal as you walk it: the deal meter at the top carries each act's answer and a check as the acts produce them, and from act 2 on a deal so far card follows you with your number, the verdict, and the play, each line linking back to the act that made it, with one press copying the position for your CFO. The left and right arrow keys walk the acts, and old step links land on the act that absorbed them.
The workflow never lets a click lose your place: any link that points outside the four acts, the model tool, a negotiation case, Ask Vera, a playbook, the vendor room, opens as an application window over the act you are on, so the workflow menu and the working deal stay exactly where you left them. The left panel also carries a Tools row with the Benchmark Library, opening the same way. Close the window and you are still mid act.
*In plain words: learn your number, pressure test the paper, plan the play, and say it right, in that order.*
Your number (workflow act 1)
Act 1 answers what you are being offered. It opens with the instant benchmark: no upload and no wait. Pick the vendor, the product, and the deal size, type the discount you are offered, and the three answers render immediately, your discount, the range comparable customers land in at your size, and where that ranks, priced per year when you add the deal value. The same inputs always place the same, because the placement is the curve guideline, not a model's guess.
Below it, the full read: the whole card is the target. Drop a quote, order form, renewal proposal, or signed contract, or browse for it, with an optional vendor hint to sharpen the cohort. The run theatre shows a real percentage over the pipeline's own beats, and you can leave at any point: the run follows you, and the finished deal desk room renders right on this act, the command band with the three answers, the six page case, and the share rail included. Continue to your benchmark simply moves you down the page to that room, and the room's What next rail leads with Negotiation strategies, one press into act 3.
Recent reviews underneath is the workspace's whole history, newest first, and each row says what the review actually was, not just a title: the customer named on the paper, the vendor, the product line, the discount held against the peer midpoint, and the verdict, plus what the later acts concluded, the pressure test verdict and the chosen play. Every deal desk room this workspace has run opens right here, and a check you set aside on this browser, even one that never produced a room, restores whole with one press of Resume, the figures, the verdict, and the play travelling back with it.
Starting over never loses work. The header carries Start a new review on every act the moment a deal is in progress, and the outgoing review is saved under Recent reviews first, whichever way the new one starts: the header button, a fresh drop, or a vendor switch mid check. A new drop is a new deal: the working figures clear and the previous deal's room steps aside while the new paper reads, so nothing from the last deal wears the new one's name. A room you open yourself from Recent reviews is different: it renders even while a new paper reads, with the reading note above it, because every brief your workspace has run stays saved and openable at any time. Coming back to the workflow with a deal already in progress simply continues it, no question asked; Start a new review in the header and Recent reviews on the first act are the way to a different deal, and every saved brief, playbook, and report stays in your workspace either way. The stage never defaults to another vendor's room: it shows the working deal's own newest brief or nothing. Download PDF prints the brief alone; the instant benchmark, the drop lane, and Recent reviews all stay off the paper.
The paper itself travels with the deal: the dropped document files into your workspace under Contracts (when your organization keeps tool documents; the room's footnote states which happened), and the later acts reuse it, the pressure test in one press and the Vera door with the contract already attached, so the workflow never asks for the same file twice.
Pressure test (workflow act 2)
Act 2 answers what is wrong with this paper. The second opinion's verdict theatre reads the contract live and returns the four page verdict brief in about a minute: the verdict, what the paper gets wrong, what each problem costs, and what to ask for instead. When the working deal carries a paper from act 1, the stage shows two doors of equal size: Continue with your document on the left runs the filed paper with no re-upload, and the drag and drop zone on the right takes a different one. The continue door always points at a document the workspace actually holds, even when the record behind it was replaced since act 1. The sample Workday renewal runs free, so you can watch a pass before spending one on your own paper, and the verdict writes itself onto the deal meter.
On the idle act, the clause level pass leads under the drop stage: the Contract Agent for the order form, the master terms and the services paper, one window that reads each kind clause by clause with the changes struck on the page and paste-ready language beside them. With a finished opinion on stage, its own Next moves carry the handoffs instead, so the tail of the page never says the same thing twice.
Plan the play (workflow act 3)
Act 3 answers what you trade. The Vera door writes any of the eleven reads, from the pricing benchmark to the final call plan, right on the act: the working deal's own paper arrives already attached when act 1 filed one, or drop another, choose the read or say what you want in your own words, and the finished brief renders in place, so planning the play never leaves the workflow. Your saved playbooks sit below, newest first, each grounded in your own paper, and the guided vendor playbooks carry the majors end to end with the typical finding stated on each card.
The research rail brings the market to the act: the vendor's fiscal quarter, the counterparty grade, and the latest wire stories, all read from the working deal's vendor, so the play is planned against what the vendor is living through this quarter.
Say it right (workflow act 4)
Act 4 answers what you say. The ghost writer holds every vendor conversation as a thread and drafts the expert reply to each inbound email, grounded in your numbers, your benchmark, and the play you chose. You edit and send from your own inbox; nothing sends itself.
The research briefings play here too: the full analyst video gallery, searchable and filterable by vendor, opens on your deal's vendor so you watch the analyst's read before the words go out.
The finish opens the war room: the negotiation thread is created with your vendor attached, the playbook and the briefs one press away, and every email in one place, where Major renewals tracks the deal to signature.
Negotiation Agent
*In plain words: drop the paper or type the vendor, press R, and three documents a CIO would forward come out in order.*
What it is. One deal worked as four steps down the left: the deal, the negotiation strategy, the talking points, and the options report for management. Each step says where it stands (waits, ready, running or done), and the screen is the document you are on, at the house measure, with what the library holds on the vendor beside it. The window wears the same frame as the Benchmark Agent and fills the screen. Open it at /deal-studio, from any renewal's Negotiate door, or from a shared link.
What each part means.
- The four steps (left). The deal, the negotiation strategy, the talking points, the options report, drawn as one ladder down the rail: a hairline joins the numbers, a finished step fills its ring and takes a tick, and the step you are on is carried on a bar at the left edge. The line under each step says its state. Keys 1 to 4 open them. New deal sits under the window's name, in the same place on all four steps: it archives the deal on screen with its documents and starts the next one at step 1.
- Step 1, the deal. Drop the contract or the vendor's offer, choose one you already hold, or type the vendor. While the paper is being read the drop zone shows the read rather than a spinner: the paper as a stack of pages with a beam sweeping it line by line, the part being read named under it, and a clock with the minutes in and the time a read usually takes. With a paper, the document itself is shown page by page on step one (Open in the reader gives search, marks and the decode) and the vendor, the term and the figures are read from it, marked "from the paper". The vendor is the publisher whose product is licensed: a quote issued by a reseller, partner or distributor is filed under the publisher named in its line items, with the party that issued it named on its own line. The three writers then have the paper itself in front of them, pages as well as text, with a search over its wording, a read of any span and the calculators beside the web and the platform's vendor material: the customer's figures come from the paper, the platform's read is checked against it, and where the two disagree the paper wins and the document follows it without comment. Every file on the contract's record goes in, up to four, so the amendment and last year's paper are read with the quote. With a vendor alone the strategy argues from the market and what you told us, and says so. The renewal date, the goal with the renewal and anything more we should know are optional.
- The sample deal. On step one, under the drop strip, Open the sample puts a finished deal on screen: a Workday HCM renewal of 4,200 workers at 21 percent off list against a peer band of 18 to 38, with the notice date five months out, and the negotiation strategy, the talking points and the options report already written on it. It is the way to see what the agent produces without spending a run on a real renewal. Nothing is uploaded, no job starts, and your own deal and its documents sit untouched behind it: Leave the sample, on step one and on the head of every document, brings them straight back. Nothing on the sample can be edited or written again, because it is the platform's own and is labelled as one.
- Step 2, the negotiation strategy. The deal on the table read off the paper line by line, the headline assessment with the five things to get right, why the vendor wants the deal now, the commercial levers (the discount and what it applies to, the commitment with its ramp, rollover and true down, the term and the exit, the payment cadence, the overage, price protection), where the deal sits (what this paper costs and how that compares, what comparable buyers of your size are offered as a range with its midpoint, and where this deal ranks in words, Poor, Below market, At market, Good or Top of the market, with the gap in points and in money over the term), the contract risk and what to redline clause by clause with section references, value beyond the price, the ask sheet (as quoted, open at, target, walk away), the asks in the order to make them, the calendar, what a good outcome looks like, and the assumption the argument rests on, priced. The platform's own tables (what is on the paper, the targets, the calendar, the sensitivity) follow the document.
- Step 3, the talking points. Written with the strategy in front of the engine as its own earlier turn, so the sentences quote the strategy's asks and the paper's clauses: the sentences to say, in the order to say them, each with the moment it belongs to and why it works; six answers for when the vendor pushes back; what not to say. A Copy button sits beside every sentence.
- Step 4, the options report. For the CIO and the CFO, written with the strategy in front of the engine: the situation in three lines, four options named from the paper's own levers (for example sign as quoted, renegotiate the price and the terms, restructure the commitment, go to the vendor direct or re quote) each priced a year and over the term with the reasons for and against side by side, the recommendation, what it needs from management, and the decision needed by a date.
- The figures on the document. Every document opens on four headline figures across the top: what this paper costs, what comparable buyers are offered, the position to hold, and what it is worth over the term. Inside it, three charts are drawn where the argument reaches them: the peer band with your paper and your target marked on it, the price walk from the offer to the settle, and the four paths priced as bars. They are drawn from the same figures the prose argues, so the two can never disagree, and where the platform holds nothing to draw the document says so in that spot rather than leaving a hole.
- Read and watch. Beside the document, the moment a vendor is known: the films and analyst briefings the platform holds on that vendor with their posters, the research papers with page one of the original as the cover, and the vendor's negotiator guide. Each opens inside the window; a short list at the foot points at the discount curve document and the guided playbook, which open in their own tab. The rail carries New deal, then the deal card (the vendor, the product, the partner that issued the paper where there is one, then the paper's own file name on one line and its annual figure and rank under it), the four steps and the saved reports, with the last few deals under them.
- The levers and the calendar (right). The uplift, the cap, the true down and the notice period are what if dials: move one and the targets, the four paths and the calendar move with it. The uplift arrives set to 7 percent so the "let it renew as it stands" path has a rate to price, and until you move it that path says on its face that the rate is an assumption, and the documents read the paper for its own escalation or indexation clause instead. The calendar dates seven phases back from the notice date the paper gives, or from the term end where it gives no notice period. Where the paper gives neither, the phases keep their order and lose their dates, the table says so, and the documents ask the vendor in writing for the term end and the notice period rather than printing a date nothing supports.
- What the documents will not fill in. A figure the paper does not carry is named as not stated, never supplied, and a list price is never worked backwards so that a discount percentage can be printed. Where your paper states no list, the documents benchmark the rates it does state, per user, per unit, per month or per year, against what comparable customers of your size pay, say plainly that the comparison is rate against rate, and name what to ask the vendor to confirm in writing. The material behind a strategy, the vendor's guide, the desk notes and the peer band, is found on the vendor's name, and a large vendor sells many product lines, so the writers are told which line your paper sells and which line the peer band came from, and they set aside anything about a different one and say they have done so.
- Send (key S). Download as Word in the note's own format, Open as PDF, forward from your own mailbox, share a link to the deal on this step, request sign off on the mandate. Every document is saved twice the moment it lands: a Word file on the paper's files, and a PDF printed once and kept beside the document. Open as PDF opens that file in the reader the research library uses, with the pages as designed, a contents list read from the document's own headings, thumbnails, zoom, find, and Save. A document written before this shipped has no printed copy and still prints from the page.
- Add to the brief. A line above each document, for example "Push harder on the term; we can live with the uplift if the rate moves"; it takes a paragraph, not a line. Write it again sends it as the next turn of the same conversation with the last version in front of the engine, so it revises rather than starts over. Steps two, three and four run side by side, so press the next one while the last one writes.
- Talk to the specialist, Ask in writing. On the head of every step, with a face: the specialist who knows the vendor. Press the face to talk out loud (key T), or Ask in writing beside it (key A): Vera reads the paper itself, the deal's figures and the whole document on screen, and answers at the length the question needs, with lists and tables where they help. A run is shown as a scene: the step, the clock, the ask ladder and the four beats of the pass.
- Watching it being written, and leaving it to run. The document appears on the step as it is written, sentence by sentence, with the writer's own stage line above it: the specialists reading the paper, the vendor research, the writing, the read back. The run belongs to the workspace and not to the window, so closing the window, losing the connection or leaving it overnight costs nothing: the writer carries on, the document is saved the moment it lands, and opening the step again on any browser picks it up where it is. Stop under the stage stops the writer; nothing is saved from a stopped run.
- What is checked after it is written. Four checks read the finished document and record what they find under it, and none of them changes a word: whether it repeated an instruction the vendor wrote into their own paper, whether it states your walk away figure or internal target, whether a figure appears that neither the paper nor the platform's reading supports, and whether money is argued in a currency other than USD with no conversion beside it. A check that could not run says so rather than passing quietly.
- How the documents are written. Since 15 September 2026 every document goes through the same three passes. Two specialists read the paper first, one for the clauses and one for the money, and leave their notes. The writer writes with the paper attached whole and the platform's bench at hand (the benchmark library for the vendor, the price catalog, the market briefing, your deal history, a sandbox for the sums), with your own record in the room: what landed in the last cycle, the asks left on the table, the vendor's commitments, the last brief filed on the deal, your organisation's notes. Then a second pass reads the finished document against the paper, and the writer revises once if it finds a figure the paper does not carry, a quote that does not match, or a question left unanswered; the revision stands only if it reads cleaner and is no shorter.
How to use it.
- Drop the paper, choose one, or type the vendor and a renewal date on step one. Not ready to? Press Open the sample and read all three documents on a worked deal first.
- Press Run the strategy (key R). The step shows what it is doing, and the document composes itself when the engine lands, about two minutes. Press 3 or 4 meanwhile; they run side by side. Every report is saved the moment it lands, as a Word file on the paper and as a PDF beside it.
- Read the document; the platform's own tables (what is on the paper, the targets, the calendar, the sensitivity) follow it. Open a film or a paper from the wall beside it without leaving the deal.
- Press 3 and write the talking points; copy the sentences you will use.
- Press 4 and write the options report; press S to share a link with the CFO or forward it from your mailbox.
- Ask Vera about anything on the page in the line under the calendar; press Talk to take it out loud.
Keys. 1 to 4 the steps, R run, S send, N a new deal (the current one is archived first), Esc close, ? this list.
Related: Renewals · Contracts · Agreement Studio
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