AI for checking purchase order terms against your standard terms

Your standard terms of purchase only protect you on the orders where somebody checked the supplier's paper against them. The supplier sends a quote or an order acknowledgement with its own terms attached, somebody in the business accepts it to get the parts moving, and your terms never get checked. Software can do the line-by-line comparison for you on every order. It cannot decide which gaps you live with, and it will not try.

What the manual check costs

CIPS describes the purchase order as "a commercial document issued by a buyer to a seller confirming the goods or services required." The problem is the second document. The supplier's acknowledgement, quote or sales order comes back with its own conditions, and somewhere in it are payment terms, a warranty period, a liability cap and a delivery clause that do not match yours.

Reading that against your standard terms takes a procurement person real time even when they know your terms cold. Microsoft Word's compare feature, which the Microsoft Support page describes as comparing two documents and displaying "what changed between them in a third new document", is built for two versions of the same document. The supplier's paper is a different document with different wording, so Word gives you a page of changes instead of a short list of gaps. The check gets skipped on small orders, and that is where nonstandard terms can get through.

Your standard terms become the playbook

In goHeather, the comparison runs against a playbook, and this is the step that makes it work for purchase orders. A playbook is a numbered list of rules, and the fastest way to build one is "Generate from a contract": upload your standard terms of purchase, the app pulls them into structured rules, and you read and edit them before saving. The app calls this "AI-drafted, you approve". A generated playbook is a first pass, and you should expect to fix a few rules before you trust it.

Each rule has a description in plain language, then a fallback position, an unacceptable deviation and a guidance note. A payment term rule might read: we require net 60; we would accept net 45 on orders under a threshold you set; we will not accept payment on receipt. That shape matters because what you need to know is how far off the supplier's term is, and whether that is far enough to send the order back.

What the check looks like on one supplier document

Upload the supplier's acknowledgement or terms to Contracts and click Review with AI. You are not asked anything. goHeather reads the file and comes back with a setup card it has already filled in: both parties identified, your side preselected, governing law read off the document, and a four-level review depth set to Issues by default. You pick your purchase-terms playbook in the Playbook field, drop the related PO or price list into the reference documents zone if the supplier's terms point to one, and run it. It takes minutes, not seconds, and it runs server-side, so you can kick it off and come back.

The findings land in a rail beside the document, grouped High, Med and Low, each one named as the problem rather than the clause. Open one and you get the original clause with its section number and a jump to the text, a suggested redline, and a plain-English note on why the wording is a problem and which side it hurts. Where the supplier's term crosses a rule you marked as an unacceptable deviation, you can mark the finding unacceptable instead of redlining it. Those are the ones you send back.

Every finding has to be decided by you, with Flag, Dismiss or Apply redline, and the count sits at the top of the screen ("9 findings left undecided"). The chat will not move on until you have cleared it. Nothing is written into the supplier's document until you apply it. The software compares and proposes. A person decides.

Why this gets more consistent over time

The loop worth setting up is "Add to playbook". When a supplier's term turns up that your standard terms never anticipated, say a restocking fee or a minimum order quantity, and you decide on it, that decision becomes a rule on the next supplier's paper. Your standard terms stop being a PDF on the intranet and become the thing every inbound order is actually checked against. The goHeather post on how the playbook decides what an AI review flags shows the same document returning very different findings under different rule sets, so the quality of this check is the quality of your playbook.

Where it stops

A review with no playbook attached is general. The app labels it "No playbook - general law". It reads only what you upload: if the supplier's terms incorporate a price list or a service schedule you did not attach, those terms are not in the review, though you can add them as reference documents. And the suggested redline is drafting language, not a position on what you should accept.

To see the comparison run on your own terms, goHeather's contract review workflow is on a free trial. Bring your standard terms of purchase and one supplier acknowledgement you already know is off.

This is legal information, not legal advice; consult a lawyer for legal advice.