16 · The manual by role

Nobody reads a manual cover to cover, and nobody should. This chapter gives each seat at the table its own way in: the five screens that role lives in, the three workflows to learn first, and the chapters worth reading in order. Find your row, follow it, and treat everything else in the manual as reference for the day you need it.

Who this chapter is for

Six seats cover almost everyone who works in the platform. If you hold two of them (a procurement lead who also owns the workspace is common), read both sections; they are short by design. Whatever your seat, Chapter 15 is the shared ramp for your first month, and the Guide door in the top bar always opens this manual at the screen you are standing on.

The procurement and sourcing lead

You own vendor relationships and the deals themselves: renewals, negotiations, new purchases. The platform's center of gravity, the contract-to-close loop, is built around your week.

The five screens you live in

• Renewals — every deadline sorted by expiry, the next one on top.
• Benchmark Library — the market read before any vendor call: your discount, the peer range, the rank.
• Major renewals — the tracked deal: mandate, tactics, the concession ledger, commitments.
• Vendors — the whole relationship per vendor on one page.
• Terms watch — what the vendor did to its price list, priced at your seat counts.

Learn these three workflows first: Plan and run a renewal negotiation, Choose between competing quotes, and Watch a vendor's market moves.

Read in this order: Chapter 01 (contracts and renewals, your home chapter), Chapter 02 (benchmarks), then Chapter 03 for the tool wall, one tool at a time as deals demand them.

The IT asset and licensing manager

You know what the organization owns, deploys, and actually uses, and you carry the audit risk. Your leverage is the gap between entitlement and deployment, and the platform's optimizers exist to find it before the vendor does.

The five screens you live in

• All tools — the optimizer wall: M365, cloud cost, VCF, workload comparison, and the rest.
• Integrations — the SAM and ITAM connections that feed entitled against deployed against active.
• Data health — your completeness score and the audit exposure estimate.
• Billing watch — billed against entitled against market, checked daily.
• Rights register — the paid-for rights your contracts already grant you.

Learn these three workflows first: Right-size licenses before a renewal or true-up, Respond to a vendor audit letter, and Connect your data and close the gaps.

Read in this order: Chapter 03 (tooling, your home chapter), Chapter 12 (integrations and clients), then Chapter 01 for the watchtowers.

The CFO and finance

You care whether the money is right: what the estate costs, whether claimed savings are real, and what the exposure is. The platform's answer to finance is that every figure traces to a source, and savings only count when invoices confirm them.

The five screens you live in

• Portfolio — the estate's money on one page: the Spend lens for cost by vendor and category, the Overview lens for realized savings verified against invoices, and concentration and market position beside them.
• Invoices — line-level verdicts against contract terms, dollars first.
• Anomalies — spend spikes and quiet billing changes surfaced before finance asks.
• Billing watch — billed against entitled against market, checked daily.
• Figures ledger — every number the platform cited for you, traced to its source fact.

Learn these three workflows first: Prove and share your savings, Dispute an invoice that does not match your contract, and Build the board pack.

Read in this order: Chapter 04 (insight, your home chapter), then Chapter 02 for what a delivered benchmark contains, then Chapter 10 so plan and allowance questions never surprise you.

Legal and contract owners

You own what the organization signs: the clause standard, the deviations, the obligations the paper creates. The platform holds your positions as data and measures every contract against them, which turns review from rereading into exception handling.

The five screens you live in

• Clause library — your positions: ideal, fallback, and walk-away language per clause.
• Coverage — the must-have template swept across the estate: Present, Deviates, Missing, or Unclear.
• AI Contract Decoder — a contract read clause by clause, risks in plain English, asks with paste-ready language.
• Vault — restricted projects for the documents most people must not see.
• Rights register — obligations and entitlements harvested from the signed paper.

Learn these three workflows first: Set your clause standard and sweep the estate, Run diligence for an acquisition, and Track agreements and never miss a notice window.

Read in this order: Chapter 01 (your home chapter), Chapter 09 (record pages, where the evidence lives), then the decoders in Chapter 03 (AI Contract Decoder, the MSA and SOW AI Agents).

The CIO and leadership

You do not work the platform daily; you consume what it proves. Your interest is the estate picture, the risk posture, and whether the function is delivering, each of which the platform states as a document you can forward rather than a dashboard you must visit.

The five screens you live in

• Portfolio — the whole estate on one page: the Estate map lens sized by spend and colored by market position, the Strategy lens with the annual plan, and realized savings verified against invoices on the Overview lens.
• Delivered reports — benchmark verdicts and the monthly board report, written to be forwarded.
• Reporting studio — a board-ready report from your own data when leadership asks for one.
• Vendor calendar — the timing map for any vendor conversation you personally take: their quarter ends read against your notice deadlines.
• Trust center — the answer you forward when security asks how the data is held.

Learn these three workflows first: Build the board pack, Prove and share your savings, and Prepare for a vendor meeting for the calls you personally take.

Read in this order: Chapter 04 (your home chapter), then the first pages of Chapter 02 to understand what a benchmark verdict means when one crosses your desk.

The org owner

You run the workspace itself: people, roles, security, connections, and the governance record. Your seat has its own full chapter, the owner's handbook, which walks the whole setup in one sitting; this section is the short form.

The five screens you live in

• Members — invitations, roles, seats, and offboarding.
• Security — two-factor, the org-wide policy, sessions, and the nested security sections.
• Integrations — every connected system, from contract intake to the SAM sources.
• Data controls — retention, deletion certificates, export, and consent.
• Team activity — who is actually using what, and the adoption report.

Learn these three workflows first: Set up your workspace, Connect your data and close the gaps, and the quarterly access review.

Read in this order: The owner's handbook end to end, Chapter 06 as its reference, then Chapter 10 so you can answer every plan question your team brings you.

Related: Your first 30 days · The owner's handbook · Which tool do I use?

Next: Chapter 17 · The owner's handbook