Agent 03 · Recover value and protect spend
Spend Guard
Prevents expense leakage across the full spending lifecycle and identifies justified opportunities to improve price, discounts and purchasing discipline.
Read-only connections · Zero-day scan · 100% coverage · Your team keeps the final say
01When it runs
What starts the work
Eve dispatches Spend Guard when one of these events arrives, checks readiness first, and records why the work was allocated.
- A new or changed budget, allocation, purchase order, receipt, expense claim, vendor bill, credit note or payment.
- Scheduled vendor and category spending reviews, or sharp changes in spend, unit rates, allocations or classifications.
02What it checks
The procedures Spend Guard performs
Every procedure has a stable identifier in the approved SOP, an expected result and required evidence. Each check records its result, its supporting evidence and anything it could not assess.
- 01
Detects exact and near duplicates across budgets, allocation entries, requisitions, purchase orders, bills, claims and payments, including different identifiers for the same economic item.
- 02
Distinguishes a valid budget revision, partial invoice, instalment or recurring charge from an unintended duplicate, tracing approval and remaining allocation.
- 03
Reconstructs budget, commitments, receipts, bills and payments to find double allocation, overcommitment, overbilling and duplicate settlement without counting one issue several times.
- 04
Builds a spot expectation from immediate trends, comparable prior bills, quantity or activity changes, remaining allocation and agreed pricing. A forecast is an expectation range, not proof that a bill is wrong.
- 05
Compares actual unit prices, totals and expected discounts with purchase orders, contracts and prior transactions, separating price drift from volume, mix, currency and timing changes.
- 06
Identifies volume rebates, early-payment discounts and other benefits that appear available, and refers the entitlement calculation to Entitlement.
- 07
Analyses vendor spending growth against the benchmark you configure and flags sharp growth for negotiation review, stating the baseline and the portion explained by volume or business growth.
- 08
Assesses capex versus opex classification against the approved policy and source purpose, sending asset questions to your finance reviewer and accounting adjustments to Journal.
- 09
Prioritises prevention before payment where possible, proposing an approved hold, cancellation, credit request, recovery or renegotiation with clear financial support.
- 10
Verifies that the cancellation, credit, refund or revised price took effect, and separates estimated savings from realised savings.
Your agreed scope identifies the procedures available for your connected systems, the evidence they need and any coverage limits. Missing sources and blocked checks stay visible rather than counting as a clean pass.
03Who it works with
One lead per finding. Named support.
Matcher performs the document comparisons, Entitlement calculates contractual benefits, your finance reviewer confirms asset treatment and Sentinel reviews indicators of intentional bypass.
Investigator resolves disputed duplicates or drift, Journal executes approved corrections, and Cash Pilot uses verified payment and collection changes.
Handoffs on this scope
Every handoff carries the question to resolve, the scope and period, the completed procedures and the unresolved differences, under one finding identifier. The receiving agent accepts or declines with a reason.
04What it files
Workbooks you can download. Reports you can read.
Each workbook reproduces the run: population, formulas, checks, exceptions and evidence references, linked back to the workpaper in Reconciliations and the originals in Records.
- Duplicate clusters across the expense lifecycle
- Budget, commitment, invoice and payment bridge
- Expected spend and price variance
- Discount opportunities and vendor growth
- Capex and opex classification review
- Expense leakage report
- Duplicate exposure report
- Vendor negotiation shortlist
- Expected-spend variance
- Realised savings report
05What it raises, what stays with you
Findings for the agent. Decisions for your team.
A duplicate expense record or payment, an exhausted allocation, unexpected price drift, a missed discount or a questionable capitalisation.
Vendor growth may be a negotiation opportunity rather than an accounting error, and is labelled as such.
Every payment hold needs Inbox approval before it is placed. Cancellations, disputes, credit and refund requests, renegotiation and classification decisions also go to your Inbox, and approved actions use your existing execution path.
Duplicate similarity, recurring-charge spacing, forecast deviation, the vendor growth benchmark and its formula, lookback, review bands and discount deadlines.
Cancelled or corrected obligations, bank refunds, applied credits and revised prices are confirmed in the source. Future bills are reconciled to the approved change before a recurring saving is recognised.
06What good looks like
What a completed result looks like
The observable outcomes Spend Guard has to produce before the duty counts as complete on your books.
- A valid monthly recurring invoice is distinguished from two invoices for the same service period.
- A duplicated purchase-order allocation is detected before it becomes a bill or a payment.
- A vendor-growth flag states the baseline, the configured formula and the portion explained by volume or business growth.
Where Spend Guard works
Value recovery
Finds duplicate bills and payments from budget to settlement, price drift against agreed terms and missed discounts, and proposes the hold, credit or renegotiation before the money leaves.
Accounts payable
Screens every bill for duplicates across budgets, orders, bills and payments, price drift against the order or contract, and missed discounts, and requests an Inbox-approved hold before the payment run.
Continuous monitoring
Reports duplicate and split spending patterns that point to a control failure rather than an accounting error.
See Spend Guard on your own books
Book a demo, or get a free Proof of Value on a limited period of your data.