Scope and objective
The objective is to state, for a defined vendor, contract version, invoice period and finality window: what was billed, what was payable, what is recoverable now, what favors the vendor, and what economic benefit has actually been applied.
Required control chain
Two state machines, not one
| State type | Allowed examples | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Financial position | Verified, review, pending finality, unverifiable, recoverable, credit issued not applied, recovered, vendor underbilled, ownership unresolved | What can be asserted economically now |
| Workflow | Found, evidenced, authorized, submitted, accepted, rejected, issued, applied, reversed | Where the claim is operationally |
A workflow event must never silently overwrite the financial position. An imported "applied" status with no buyer-ledger evidence is a critical data gap, not recovered money.
Minimum money definitions
- Vendor billed: the vendor's reconstructable claim.
- Expected payable: deterministic money under the authorized rulebook.
- Gross exposure: deduplicated potential amount affected before ownership and claimability gates.
- Recoverable now: defensible buyer claim less buyer-side applied credits.
- Vendor-favorable: amount the independent calculation says the buyer may owe.
- Applied benefit: posted buyer-side economic effect tied to the claim and not later reversed.
Mandatory no-go gates
No money claim should be issued when the governing rulebook is not authorized; amount or currency is missing; material source files failed; finality is immature; ownership is unresolved; invoice-level commitments are unmodeled; or the proposed amount rests only on semantic interpretation.
Public and proprietary boundary
Public: definitions, state model, evidence classes, authority requirements, currency isolation, no-go gates and reproducible synthetic qualification. Proprietary: leakage taxonomy, fuzzy matching, thresholds, claim prioritization, vendor quirks, collision-resolution logic, dispute playbooks and recovery history.