Onit's Spend Agent reviews invoices submitted by vendors against natural-language billing guidelines uploaded by Onit clients. It instantly reviews invoices, providing detailed AI summaries to clients; this enables them to make highly informed decisions on approving or disputing invoices and allows the user to choose whether the AI automatically approves or disputes invoices as they come in.

This guide will take you step-by-step through using Spend Agent in your invoice workflows.

Enabling Spend Agent

There are two ways to enable Spend Agent:

The first is to go to the Invoice Settings within your Settings tab. 

Click Preferences in the Invoice Settings menu.

Under Preferences, go to Spend Agent Review and toggle it On to enable Spend Agent. 

In this menu, you can also choose to turn on Spend Agent Review Auto-Adjustments. When On, Spend Agent can display recommended adjustments and automatically apply them when applicable. When Off, Spend Agent continues reviewing invoices and showing violations but must not recommend or auto-apply adjustments. 

The second way to enable Spend Agent is through the Vendor app. Go into a Vendor profile and click on Settings. 

Click the button next to Spend Agent Review (it will show the current Spend Agent Review status of Sentry, Auto, or Disabled). 

You'll see three different options pop up:

• Sentry mode: Spend Agent reviews invoices and provides insights to clients; clients are the ones who approve or reject the invoices.
• Auto mode: Spend Agent automatically reviews and approves/rejects invoices. Rejected invoices are returned to the clients with insights into the rejection.
• Disabled: Spend Agent is disabled for the vendor.

Setting up Billing Guidelines

Setting up Account-Level Billing Guidelines

To set up billing guidelines at a high account level—basically, the standard billing guidelines NOT specific to a vendor—here's what to do:

Within Invoice Settings, click on Outside Counsel Guideline Files. There, you can explore the already uploaded guideline files or upload new ones with the Upload Files button.

After clicking on Upload Files, find the file on your system to upload or drag and drop it onto the screen. This screen will appear. Here, you can select whether you want to set the file as the Outside Counsel Guideline to use by clicking on the Set as OCG button. Click Upload to finalize.

You'll see the file appear in the Outside Counsel Guideline Files directory with the Outside Counsel Guidelines icon appearing next to the file name.

Spend Agent will use those designated guidelines to review invoices for all vendors that do not have their own specific billing guidelines set. The next section will cover how to set up vendor-level billing guidelines.

Setting up Vendor-Level Billing Guidelines

To set up billing guidelines for a specific vendor, head into the vendor profile page and go to the Files screen.

Click on Upload Files and find the billing guidelines file or drag and drop it into the screen.

Click on the Set as OCG button to set the file as the Outside Counsel Guideline file; click Upload to upload the file. You can also fill in the Category, Labels, and Description if necessary. 

You'll see the Guidelines show up in the Files screen marked with Outside Counsel Guidelines. Going forward, Spend Agent will use the uploaded billing guidelines to review the invoices from that specific vendor.

Spend Agent in Action

Within the Invoices section, you'll see a note when Spend Agent finds a violation.

Clicking into the Invoice details page will show the Spend Agent Warning at the top of the screen.

Within the invoice detail, you can click Invoice Flags to see the flagged details.

Spend Agent will also provide users with a Summary of the violations within the invoice.

Violations are also listed in the line-item view.

You'll also see a notification when Spend Agent is still analyzing the information.

Once the invoice is approved, users will see a Spend Agent Approved note at the top of the screen.

On the Vendor side in CounselGo, vendors will see Spend Agent violations noted on a submitted invoice.

If an invoice is automatically rejected by Spend Agent, vendors will see a full summary of the rejection reasons.