Which tool do I use?

The platform has more than a hundred features, and nobody should have to learn that map. This chapter is the finder: every feature listed under the job it does, with the situations it answers phrased the way you would say them. Scan the group that matches what you are trying to do, find your situation in the left column, and the right columns name the tool and where it lives.

Five faster ways to the same answer:

• The Tool finder screen. Open Tool finder from the Tooling group in the rail: the same index as this chapter, with a job dropdown, a situation search, and a Start button on every result.
• Ask Vera. Press Ctrl/⌘ J anywhere, or the Ask Vera button at the bottom right, and say what you are trying to do in your own words. She names the one tool that does it and links you straight there.
• The command palette. Press Ctrl/⌘ K and type what you want. The palette matches tools by what they do, not only by their names.
• The Verdict Bar. If your starting point is a document and you do not know which analysis it needs, drop it at Verdict Bar. It is classified and routed to the matching engine automatically.
• The More catalog. The More entry in the left rail lists every destination in the workspace, grouped and searchable.

Routes below are workspace paths: open them from the rail, the palette, or by appending them to app.vendorbenchmark.com.

The index currently covers 111 features and 217 situations.

Check a price or a quote

You have a number, a quote, or a proposal, and you want to know how it compares to the market.

The tools in this group

• Verdict Bar (/verdict). Drop any document, quote, contract, order form, or invoice; it is classified, routed to the matching engine, and judged against the market in about a minute.
• Instant benchmarks (/benchmarking). Self-serve price benchmarks for hundreds of vendors and product lines: type your deal, see where it lands against the market, no upload needed.
• Second opinion (/tooling/second-opinion). Drop a contract and get a benchmarked second opinion in minutes: your placement against the peer set, the money on the table priced, five arguments that work, and three priced paths.
• Snap a quote (/tooling/snap-a-quote). Photograph or screenshot any vendor quote: every line item is read off the paper, checked against published list prices, placed against comparable deals, and countered.
• Quote Face-Off (/tooling/quote-faceoff). Drop two or three competing quotes for the same need: equivalent SKUs aligned into one board, every line benchmarked, and the best mix across all papers priced.
• Proposal comparison (/tooling/proposal-comparison). Drop two vendor proposals and see exactly what changed: every pricing change priced, every term change read, each marked improved, worse, or unchanged.
• Rate Card Benchmark (/tooling/rate-benchmark). Upload a services rate card or SOW and see every day rate against the market band per role, region, and vendor tier, with the annualized overpay per line.
• Portfolio benchmark (/benchmarking/portfolio). Your whole vendor portfolio placed against the market in one standing view, with scenarios and the savings each would unlock.
• Benchmark all my vendors (/reports/vendor-benchmark). One AI-written report that benchmarks every vendor you track and ranks the gaps.
• Analyst benchmark (upload a proposal) (/contracts/new). Upload a contract or quote and a human analyst benchmarks it and delivers a written report.

Review a contract before you sign

You have paper to read: a contract, an MSA, a statement of work, or two versions to compare.

The tools in this group

• Contract decode (/tooling/contract-decode). Upload any vendor contract and watch it decoded live: every consequential clause in plain English, up to ten changes worth asking for with paste-ready language, and a term-by-term market benchmark.
• MSA Decoder (/tooling/msa-decoder). A buyer-side legal review of a master services agreement: liability cap, indemnities, IP, data protection, termination, and payment terms judged against standard negotiated positions, with replacement language.
• SOW Decoder (/tooling/sow-decoder). A buyer-side review of a consulting statement of work: scope leaks, deliverables without acceptance criteria, junior-heavy staffing, open-ended fees, and rate terms benchmarked.
• Contract time machine (/tooling/time-machine). Drop last year's paper and this year's for the same vendor and get the real story: terms won, protections that quietly disappeared, and the price walk line by line.
• Compare (/contracts/compare). A side-by-side AI redline scan of two documents already in your workspace.
• Coverage (/contracts/coverage). Must-have clause coverage across the whole estate: which contracts carry the protections you require and which are missing them.
• Clause library (/clause-library). Preferred clause language, fallback positions, and walkaway lines, ready to paste into any negotiation.
• Review tables (/review-tables). Ask one question and have it answered across every contract you store, as a table.

Run a renewal

A renewal is coming, and you want the calendar, the plan, and the vendor-specific playbook.

The tools in this group

• Renewals (/renewals). Every agreement sorted by expiry with its notice window, status, and automatic team alerts when a window opens.
• Renewal playbook (/renewals/playbook). A guided, dated plan for one renewal: timeline, talking points, and the negotiation moves in order.
• Managed renewals (/renewals/managed). Hand the renewal calendar to the VendorBenchmark team; fees are charged on verified savings.
• Vendor calendar (/vendor-calendar). Every vendor's fiscal year and quarter ends on one timeline, so you time asks for when reps need deals.
• Fair Renewal Rider (/rider). A standard addendum that caps uplifts and locks renewal protections, ready to attach to any deal.
• Microsoft EA renewal playbook (/tooling/ms-ea-renewal). The Microsoft EA renewal run end to end: scope the cycle, load the estate, work E5, Copilot and Azure MACC savings, and finish with the CFO case.
• Adobe ETLA renewal playbook (/tooling/adobe-etla). The Adobe ETLA renewal end to end: Admin Console evidence, inactive seats cut in the only window allowed, GenAI padding decomposed, the VIP alternative priced.
• IBM ELA playbook (/tooling/ibm-ela). Renew the bundle or right-size out: IBM's quote decomposed line by line, shelfware S&S dropped while keeping perpetual licenses, ILMT remediated before it becomes audit leverage.
• Anthropic EA playbook (/tooling/anthropic-ea). The Anthropic enterprise agreement run on your own usage: model mix right-sized, caching and Batch wired, the commitment sized off your forecast with rollover and price protection.
• Oracle ULA certification playbook (/tooling/oracle-ula-certification). Renew or certify, decided on numbers: assess the position, maximize deployments before the count, work the certification rules, and exit with the licenses banked.
• RISE with SAP playbook (/tooling/rise-with-sap). The move from ECC or on-premise S/4HANA to RISE, end to end: the FUE count rebuilt from usage evidence, SAP's offer decomposed, alternatives priced, a five-year TCO case.
• Salesforce SELA playbook (/tooling/salesforce-sela). The SELA renewed on your numbers: the Unlimited base segmented against real usage, add-on shelfware cleared, the Agentforce commitment sized to measured burn.
• ServiceNow renewal playbook (/tooling/servicenow-renewal). Renew on your numbers, not theirs: the discount benchmarked against the corridor, idle seats trued down in the one window allowed, the uplift capped.
• Workday renewal playbook (/tooling/workday-renewal). The Workday renewal negotiated on the market: the discount benchmarked against the peer corridor, the bundled expansion decomposed, worker bands trued to reality.
• Third-party support playbook (/tooling/third-party-support). Move stable OEM support to third-party support on your terms: eligibility decided product by product and a blind tender run across providers.

Negotiate the deal

The negotiation is live, or about to be, and you want preparation, leverage, and support in the room.

The tools in this group

• Vera Deal-Room (/tooling/dossier). Drop one contract and the whole negotiation deal room assembles itself: the deal placed against the market, the decoded ask list, an analyst brief, the tactics playbook, live vendor intel, and the priced walk-away alternative.
• Negotiations (/negotiation). Each live deal tracked with a mandate, counters, tactic analysis, a concession ledger, and reply drafts.
• Vera AI-run negotiation (Case Mode) (/cases/new). Pick the vendors, hand over the contacts, approve the mandate, and Vera runs the negotiation herself, checking in for decisions.
• Competitive Quotes (the Quote Fleet) (/negotiation/fleet). An agent negotiates a set of tail vendors at once, collecting bids and pushing each toward the benchmark.
• Build competitive scenarios (/tooling/competitive-scenarios). Name the product you are renewing and get the credible alternatives researched and three to five cost scenarios priced against the renewal, with ready-to-send emails.
• Negotiation self play (/tooling/self-play). The machine plays your renewal to completion eight times, four strategies against two rep temperaments, and shows the outcome distribution and the sequencing move that mattered.
• Vendor Twin (/vendor-twin). A simulation of your vendor's rep to spar against: practice the conversation before the real one.
• Meeting war room (/meetings). Prep, live support, and debrief for vendor meetings, grounded in your contracts and benchmarks.
• Buying blocs (/blocs). Join other buyers renewing the same vendor in the same window to negotiate from combined volume.
• The Desk (/desk). The working queue for deals in flight: what needs you now, what the AI moved overnight, and the next move on each.

Cut software spend

You own a budget number and need to find, plan, and capture the savings.

The tools in this group

• Spend optimization (/tooling/spend-optimization). Pick your top vendors by spend and get a written optimization plan: about twenty prioritized moves across right-sizing, renegotiation, consolidation, terms, and timing, anchored to your renewal calendar.
• Spend Intelligence (/tooling/spend-intel). Upload an AP or ERP spend export and get the ledger read back: every supplier classified, duplicate payments and price steps flagged, a six-month forecast with buying windows marked.
• Spend (/spend). Spend by vendor and category, built automatically from the proposals and agreements you track.
• Opportunities (/opportunities). Every benchmarked vendor above market, ranked by the annual prize, ready to turn into a tracked deal.
• Anomalies (/anomalies). Spend and billing anomalies surfaced across the estate: spikes, drift, and things that changed without a signature.
• Invoices (/invoices). Invoice line-item intelligence: invoices reconciled against contracts, overbilling flagged, recovery tracked.
• Rights register (/obligations). The rights and entitlements you already paid for, harvested from your contracts, with deadlines to use them.
• Spend Studio (/tooling/spend-studio). Size Claude, OpenAI, Copilot Cowork, and Agentforce commitments from your own usage exports, and price the committed-spend deal before you sign.

Licenses and cloud

Usage-driven right-sizing: seats, cores, and cloud workloads measured against what you pay for.

The tools in this group

• M365 License Optimization (/tooling/m365-optimization). Upload your M365 usage export to find inactive accounts, right-size E5/E3/E1, and size Copilot, with a per-user reassignment plan.
• VMware VCF licensing calculator (/tooling/vcf-licensing). Upload your RVTools export to size the VCF cores Broadcom will bill, build three pricing scenarios against real discount bands, and get a negotiation playbook.
• Cloud cost optimizer (/tooling/cloud-cost). Upload a cost export from AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI and get a FinOps assessment: identified savings by workstream and a phased action plan.
• Cloud workload comparator (/tooling/workload-compare). Describe your workloads or import an inventory and see what each costs on AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, and the optimal placement across the portfolio.

Handle a vendor audit

An audit letter arrived, or you want to be ready for one.

The tools in this group

• Audit letter decoder (/tooling/audit-decoder). Drop the audit letter the moment it lands: who is actually auditing you, the deadline as a business-day countdown, what is demanded versus implied, the three things not to do first, and the response plan.

Know your vendors and the market

Standing intelligence: how your vendors behave, what they are changing, and what other buyers see.

The tools in this group

• Vendors (/vendors). Every vendor you track as a briefing: position, spend, paper on file, and how they behave in negotiations.
• Vendor scorecards (/scorecards). A renewal scorecard per vendor: how they price, how they negotiate, and what a strong outcome looks like.
• Research (/research). The research library: negotiation toolkits, market outlooks, terms benchmarks, and vendor assessments, downloadable.
• The Vera Wire (/wire). The vendor news feed: pricing moves, licensing changes, and market events filtered to vendors like yours.
• Policy watch (/wire/policy). Vendor licensing and product-terms documents monitored for changes, diffed daily.
• Your watchtower (Terms Watch) (/wire/watch). Your vendors' terms, billing, and price lists watched for drift, with alerts tied to your own estate.
• Weekly vendor report (/wire/weekly). A weekly written report per vendor you follow: what moved, what it means, what to do.
• Monthly briefing (/briefing). A monthly executive briefing over your whole estate: what changed, what is coming, and where to act.
• Community polls (/polls). What other buyers are seeing, asked and answered in structured polls.

Organize contracts and documents

Getting the estate in: filing, tracking, searching, and keeping the data healthy.

The tools in this group

• Your Archive (/archive). Drop a whole contract folder and Vera files it by vendor, extracts the terms, and briefs you on what the estate contains.
• Agreements (/agreements). The ledger of signed agreements: vendor, value, expiry, notice period, and the files, feeding renewals and spend automatically.
• Proposals (/contracts). Every uploaded contract and quote with its status from upload to delivered report.
• Vault (/vault). Secure project rooms for sensitive documents, with per-project access.
• Document search (/doc-search). Full-text search inside every contract and file you store.
• Document clusters (/doc-clusters). Your documents grouped automatically by similarity, so duplicates and families surface.
• Data health (/data-health). Extraction quality across the estate: what is complete, what is missing, and what needs review.
• Portfolio (/portfolio). The whole estate in one view: vendors, values, concentrations, and risk.
• Estate map (/portfolio/map). The estate drawn as a map: every vendor, sized and colored by what matters.
• Migration Studio (/migration). A guided migration of your existing contract records and files into the workspace, with a dry run, reconciliation, and go-live.
• Diligence (/diligence). An M&A diligence run over a target's software contracts: exposure, change-of-control, and synergy, in a clean room.
• Strategy (/strategy). The standing vendor strategy: category plans, positions, and the moves agreed for the year.
• Your organization (/org). The organization's estate page: entities, structure, and what belongs where.

Prove savings and report up

Turning outcomes into evidence: verified savings, deliverables, and executive reporting.

The tools in this group

• Savings proof (/savings). Savings reconciled against what vendors actually billed, not what the deal memo claimed.
• Verified wins (/savings/wins). Badges, deal scores, and an opt-in wins board for outcomes verified against billing.
• Guarantees (/guarantees). Engagements with the fee at risk: the guarantee terms, progress, and the certificate at the end.
• Documents (the studio shelf) (/studio). Every delivered report, brief, and export on one shelf, with sharing and history.
• Reporting studio (/studio/generate). Generate an executive report from your data: spend, renewals, savings, or a custom brief, grounded and citation-checked.

Buy something new

Net-new purchases: requests, sourcing, bids, and approvals.

The tools in this group

• Sourcing (/sourcing). The sourcing pipeline from request to award: suppliers fielded, bids collected and scored, the decision documented.
• Deal desk (/sourcing/desk). The intake and triage desk for deals: what came in, who owns it, what happens next.
• Requests (/requests). Purchase requests from the business, captured and routed.
• Approvals (/approvals). The approvals queue: deals waiting on a decision, with the negotiator's recommendation attached.

Work with your team

Coordination: who does what, where discussions live, and what is waiting on you.

The tools in this group

• Tasks (/tasks). The team's task list across deals, renewals, and projects.
• My work (/my-work). Everything waiting on you personally: tasks, approvals, mentions, and renewals.
• Team (/team). Who covers what: vendor ownership and coverage across the team.
• Board (/board). The internal discussion board: questions, decisions, and wins, kept where the work is.
• Chat (/chat). Direct messages with your team inside the workspace.
• Notifications (/notifications). The notification feed: everything that changed that you asked to hear about.
• Saved (/saved). Your reading room: every report and research paper you bookmarked.
• Support (/support). Support tickets with the VendorBenchmark team.
• Referrals (/referrals). Your referral code and earnings: refer a company and earn a share of their first-year spend.
• Your engagements (/delivery). Service engagements you run with the VendorBenchmark team, in one workspace shared with your members.
• Advisory (/advisory). The concierge desk: book analyst time and advisory sessions.

Put AI to work

The assistant and the agent workforce: standing watches, scheduled reports, and automated jobs.

The tools in this group

• Vera AI (/ask). The assistant over your whole workspace: ask anything about your contracts, vendors, and the market, and be routed to the tool that does the job.
• Agent Center (/agents). Your AI workforce: standing watchdogs, scheduled analysts, autopilots, and the wizard to build a new agent from a sentence.
• Workflow agents (/workflows). Multi-step automations chained from the platform's tools, run on triggers or on demand.

Community and outside help

Other buyers, peers who have done your deal, and vetted vendor-side experts.

The tools in this group

• Buyer Network (/buyer-network). The trading floor: threads with other buyers about vendors, tactics, and what deals look like right now.
• Buyer intros (/network). Introductions to peers who have done the deal you are about to do.
• Expert Bench (/experts). Vetted insiders from the vendor side, bookable for the deals where inside knowledge changes the outcome.

Set up and govern the workspace

Owner and security jobs: members, integrations, approvals, and the trust posture.

The tools in this group

• Members (/settings/members). Invite teammates, set roles, and manage access (org owners).
• Integrations (/settings/integrations). Connect SAM, ITAM, SSO directories, spend systems, and email rails so the workspace fills itself.
• API (/settings/api). API keys and the MCP surface for wiring the platform into your own systems.
• Security (/settings/security). Two-factor, sessions, SSO, audit log, data controls, and the security posture view.
• Deal approvals (/settings/approvals). Approval rules: which deals need whose sign-off before they close (org owners).
• Notification settings (/settings/notifications). Exactly which alerts you receive, all strictly opt-in.
• Trust center (/trust). How your data is isolated, encrypted, and handled, written for your security team.

Keeping this chapter current

This chapter is generated from the platform's use-case index, the same source Vera uses to route "which tool should I use?" questions, so the manual and the assistant always give the same answer. It regenerates whenever the index changes.