Glossary

BRM

BRM’s automated workers that find contracts in email and drives, extract keyterms, track renewals and prepare actions for human approval.

Spend

Usage-based charges for AI models and APIs, billed per token processed. Costs can grow quickly and sit outside normal contract tracking.

Compliance

A timestamped record of who approved, changed or signed what, used as evidence during audits and reviews.

Renewals

A term that renews the contract automatically for another period unless one party gives notice before a set deadline. Also called an evergreen clause.

BRM

BRM policies that run continuously against your vendors and alert the right person when something changes, such as an expired certification or new sub-processor.

Contracts

A signed change to an existing agreement. Amendments can quietly alter price, term or notice periods, so they must be read alongside the original.

Platform

Software for drafting, negotiating, signing and storing contracts. A CLM manages the document. It usually doesn’t track the spend, usage or relationship behind it.

Renewals

The point where an agreement extends into a new term, either automatically or through a new signed order.

Compliance

What each party has committed to in an agreement, SLAs, security standards, notice duties, that needs tracking for the life of the contract.

Compliance

A contract that sets out how a vendor may process personal data on your behalf, as required by laws such as CCPA, and GDPR.

Contracts

A term that excuses a party from performing when events outside its control, natural disasters, war, pandemics, make it impossible.

Contracts

A promise by one party to cover the other’s losses from specific claims, such as IP infringement or a data breach caused by the vendor.

Contracts

A cap on how much each party can owe if something goes wrong, commonly tied to the fees paid over the previous 12 months.

Contracts

The umbrella contract that sets the legal terms,liability, IP, confidentiality, payment,for all future work with a vendor. Individual purchases sit underneath it.

Spend

Purchases made outside approved processes, contracts or vendors, often on a corporate card.

Contracts

A promise that you will receive pricing or terms at least as good as the vendor gives comparable customers.

Renewals

The deadline before a renewal by which you must give written notice to cancel or renegotiate, for example, 90 days before the end of the term. Also called an opt-out window.

Contracts

The document that records what you are buying under an MSA: products, quantities, price, term length and renewal terms.

Renewals

A term that lets the vendor raise prices at renewal or on a schedule, by a fixed percentage or an index such as CPI. Buyers often negotiate a cap on the increase.

Spend

The end-to-end buying process: requisition, approval, purchase order, receipt of goods or services, invoice and payment.

Spend

A buyer-issued document that authorizes a purchase and lists the items, quantities and agreed price. It becomes binding once the vendor accepts it.

Renewals

Revisiting a vendor agreement’s price, terms and scope before it renews, so the next term reflects actual usage, market pricing and the buyer’s priorities.

Platform

Discovering, tracking and optimizing the software-as-a-service apps a company uses, including who owns them, what they cost and how much they are used.

Spend

The build-up of overlapping, duplicate or forgotten software subscriptions across teams.

Compliance

A standard set of questions a vendor answers about its security controls, used during due diligence and renewals.

Contracts

A vendor’s measurable service commitments, such as uptime or response times, and the remedy, often service credits, if they are missed.

IT

AI tools adopted by employees without review, which can expose company data and create untracked spend.

IT

Software bought or signed up for without IT or Finance knowing, often on a corporate card or a free trial that converts.

Spend

Software licenses a company pays for but doesn’t use, the gap between seats licensed and seats active.

Contracts

A separate agreement that modifies or adds to the main contract, often a discount, extra right or concession that is easy to lose track of.

Compliance

An independent audit report showing that a company’s security controls were designed well and operated effectively over a period of time, typically 6–12 months.

Spend

The share of a company’s third-party spend that is tracked, tied to a contract and actively governed.

Contracts

A document defining the scope, deliverables, timeline and fees for a specific piece of services work.

Compliance

A third party your vendor uses to process your data. New sub-processors can change your risk without changing your contract.

Platform

A procurement discipline for managing a company’s most strategic suppliers to improve value, performance and risk over time.

Spend

The many small, low-value purchases that make up a small share of total spend but a large share of vendors, and usually go unmanaged.

Contracts

A right to end a contract without cause, usually with advance notice and sometimes a fee.

Compliance

Assessing and monitoring the security, privacy, financial and operational risk that outside parties introduce to a business.

Renewals

A periodic reconciliation, often annual, where you pay for seats or usage above what was originally contracted.

Spend

Billing based on consumption, API calls, compute, tokens, rather than a flat fee per seat. Costs move month to month with usage.

Spend

SLA credits / invoice discrepancies, AI spend management, vendor consolidation, procurement orchestration / intake-to-procure and “AI meeting notes for vendor calls.” That can link to Relationship intelligence page

Compliance

Reviewing a vendor’s security, financial health, legal standing and compliance before signing a contract.

Platform

The process of finding, approving, contracting, paying, monitoring and renewing or exiting the third parties a company buys from.

IT

Collecting a new vendor’s details, documents and approvals, security, legal, finance, before they can be paid or given access.

Platform

The practice and category of software that combines everything known about each vendor into one continuously updated record that teams can query and act on.

Platform

Software that keeps one live record of every vendor, contracts, spend, performance, communications and renewal dates, so teams can manage each relationship rather than just store its paperwork.

Compliance

The part of third-party risk management focused on vendors: assessing them before signing and monitoring them for changes afterwards.