AI for comparing supplier contract terms side by side

You have three suppliers bidding for the same category and three sets of paper, and each one puts the payment term, the liability cap and the termination notice somewhere different. One buries the notice period in a schedule. One has a cap in clause 14 and a carve-out in clause 22 that undoes half of it. Reading all three and keeping a tally in a spreadsheet takes a day you don't have.

goHeather has no split-screen view with contract A on the left and contract B on the right. It gets you to a comparison a different way: the same read of every contract, against the same standard, with the facts pulled out under the same headings each time.

Start with one standard for all three

CIPS, in its guidance on tender evaluation, puts it in one line: "Each tender must be treated in the same way." The same goes for the contracts behind the tenders. If one person reads supplier A and someone else reads supplier B, some of the differences you find will be differences between the two readers.

In goHeather the standard is a playbook: a named list of numbered rules, each with a primary position in plain language plus, under Advanced options, fallback positions, unacceptable deviations and guidance notes. You can build one for the category from scratch, or upload your own standard supply contract and have goHeather generate the rules from it. The app calls that "AI-drafted, you approve", and it means it: read and edit a generated playbook before you trust it.

Then you review each supplier's contract against that one playbook. One MSA in the goHeather account was reviewed against five different playbooks and came back with 17, 16, 8, 8 and 8 findings. Change the playbook and you change what counts as a problem, so hold it fixed across the set.

Run the review on each contract

Open a supplier's contract and click Review with AI. There is no form to fill in. goHeather reads the document and comes back with a setup card already completed: both parties identified, your side preselected, the governing law read off the document, a review depth setting with four levels (Issues by default), and a playbook picker. Pick the category playbook. If supplier B's pricing lives in a separate rate schedule, drop it in the reference documents zone. The review reads what it is given, and a schedule you leave on your desk is not in the review.

Click Run full review and come back in a few minutes. Each contract gets a findings rail grouped High, Med and Low, with every finding named as the problem ("Amendment process is one-sided", "Data privacy indemnity is uncapped"). Open one and you get the original clause with its section number, a suggested redline, and a plain-English note on which side the wording hurts.

Because every contract was scored against the same rules, the findings rails are comparable. Supplier A has four findings, supplier B has nine, and you can see which rules each one broke. The suggested redlines are drafting language, though, and say nothing about what you should accept.

Line up the Deal Abstracts

Under each findings rail sits a Deal Abstract. It is the fact sheet of the deal, in the same order every time: Parties, Agreement type, Effective date, Term and renewal, Fees or pricing, Payment terms, Termination summary, Governing law and venue, Notice requirements, Key commercial and operational obligations, Notable commercial carve-outs. On a real consulting agreement it ran to about ninety bullets, down to the SOW cap and the named person invoices go to. It downloads as a DOCX.

This is the side-by-side, and you assemble it. Three Deal Abstracts with identical headings go into one spreadsheet, one column per supplier. The WorldCC Foundation's Contract Design Pattern Library says of tables that "they also facilitate comparison and choice between different elements", and that is the point here: the slow part of building that table was finding the facts, and that part is done for you.

One caution. If a contract gets edited after its review, the Deal Abstract shows a banner saying the review needs to be re-run. Do that before you compare.

What the contract list shows you

Every uploaded contract also lands in a searchable list with Start Date, End Date and Notice to Terminate Date pulled out at upload. That puts the three suppliers' dates in one view. But the notice column holds the contract's own wording, "thirty (30) days' written notice" next to "no less than 7 days' written notice", so you can read it across the rows and you cannot sort or filter by it.

Where it stops

Nothing closes on its own. Each review tracks how many findings you have decided, and the chat for that contract will not continue until every finding has been accepted or dismissed. goHeather reads, checks against your rules, flags, and pulls the facts into the same shape every time. Which supplier gets the award, and which clause you will live with to get there, is your call.

If you are running a supplier selection with several sets of paper, the goHeather contract review workflow is built for this kind of repeat read. For the first-pass side, see how goHeather handles inbound vendor agreements.

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