08 · Glossary & FAQ

The words the platform uses, and the questions people ask most. If a term on screen is unfamiliar, it is probably defined here.

Glossary

Proposal — a vendor quote or contract you upload for our analysts to benchmark. It moves along a path: Uploaded, In review, Benchmarked, Delivered. Lives under Analyst Benchmark.

Agreement — a signed contract you track for spend and renewals, not necessarily uploaded as a document. Lives under Agreements.

Benchmark Library (formerly Instant benchmarks) — the self-serve price check you run yourself against market data. No upload, no analyst, a result in about two minutes. See Benchmark Library.

Analyst benchmark — the deliverable our team produces from an uploaded proposal: metrics, market ranges, and a written narrative. Delivered to Delivered reports.

Report — any delivered narrative document you read or forward: the analyst benchmark, board reports, strategy reports.

Deliverable — the umbrella for every generated artifact: reports, briefs, playbooks, memos, and scans. They collect in Deliverables.

Brief — a short AI-generated executive summary of one thing: a contract, a vendor, or a renewal.

Playbook — a structured negotiation guide, either generated by an agent or curated for a specific vendor. See Playbooks.

Vendor — the company you are buying from. Called a supplier only inside the Sourcing module, where RFP language applies.

Verdict — the one line call a benchmark or a tool report leads with: where the deal ranks, said plainly, before any of the supporting figures.

Notice window — the period before an agreement expires during which you must tell the vendor if you are cancelling or renegotiating. Set as 30, 60, or 90 days. Teammates who opted into renewal alerts are emailed when it opens.

Percentile — where your deal sits against a cohort of comparable buyers. A lower percentile on price usually means a better deal for you.

Corridor — the calibrated range of renewal outcomes behind our benchmarks. Vendor grades are read from it.

Buying bloc — an opt-in group of buyers of the same vendor who renew in a coordinated window under one term sheet, anonymous until mutual opt-in. See Buying blocs.

Fair Renewal Rider — the versioned standard addendum you attach to every renewal: uplift cap, benchmark repricing, audit conduct, and change-of-control protection. See Fair Renewal Rider.

Vera — the AI analyst, grounded in your contracts and our market data. The feature is branded Vera AI and opens anywhere with Ctrl or Cmd J. See Vera AI, and the Vera handbook for the working relationship.

The three answers — the order every benchmark answers in: the discount you are being offered, what comparable customers get as a range with its midpoint, and where the deal ranks. Everything else in a benchmark is supporting material.

Rank — the one-word verdict on a deal: Poor, Below market, At market, Good, or Top of the market, always stated with the gap in points and in money over the term.

Grounded — backed by a checkable source. A grounded figure carries a citation to the record or evidence it came from; a figure the data cannot support is refused ("not on file") rather than estimated.

Mandate — the written authorization a negotiation runs under: the target, the walk-away, what may be revealed, and how much rope. Agent-run deals never contact a vendor without one you approved.

Walk-away — the boundary at which you genuinely stop; the mandate's honest edge. A walk-away that rehearsal keeps breaking through is not real yet.

Concession ledger — the running record of every give and get on both sides of a negotiation, so the trade balance is a fact rather than a feeling.

Commitments — vendor promises captured on the deal record so they reach the final paper. A promise not in the contract is a memory.

Case — an agent-run deal in Case Mode: Vera negotiates under your mandate, you decide every offer, and one rule holds throughout: at most one pending human decision at a time.

Case file — a record opened as a full-screen set of numbered executive-brief documents, paged like a dossier, always ending in a What now sheet whose moves run on the record's own figures.

Workroom — the working surface a finished run opens into: the document on stage, the dock of moves beside it, and Ask Vera grounded on the whole case.

Deal desk room — where a dropped quote's finished brief lands, and the surface you take into the pricing round. See the deal desk room.

The Wire — the always-on market feed: pricing moves, licensing changes, research, and policy diffs, each item read for what it means for your estate. See The Vera Wire.

Watchtower — the standing watch surfaces: Terms watch on the vendor's published prices, Billing watch on your own invoices against entitlements.

Decode — the clause-by-clause plain-English read of a document, with paste-ready asks. The family: Contract Agent, the SOW Agent, the MSA Agent, the Audit letter decoder.

Staging — where a Enterprise Uploader run holds everything it loads: invisible to alerts, digests, and agents until an owner signs the estate off, in one transaction.

Binding — assembling a master agreement and its amendments into one contract whose terms in force are computed across the stack, newest document winning on each term separately. Binding is what makes a renewal date true.

Superseded — paper replaced by a newer agreement, judged as history: kept, searchable, and never polluting the renewal calendar.

Sourcing runway — the working time between today and the notice window: the stretch in which you are negotiating, before the contract starts deciding for you.

Benchmark credit — one full analyst benchmark added to a plan without included ones: $5,000, billed by invoice, requested by an owner from the proposal page itself.

Showing (Everyone / Mine) — the lens on screens that list work the whole workspace shares: the Home activity ledger, the Documents library, and the Reports shelf. Everyone draws every member's work and is what a workspace opens on; Mine narrows the page to what you created. It is a view and never a permission: choosing Mine hides nothing from your colleagues, and choosing Everyone reveals nothing that was private. The choice is per person and is remembered across sessions.

Signed row — a row or card that names who did the thing, rather than leaving it anonymous. Your own work reads You in accent blue, a colleague reads their own name, a document the platform produced on its own reads Vera, and seeded demonstration data reads Sample. Work that has always been private to one person (your Vera conversations, your tool drafts, your workroom sessions, your notifications) is never listed to anyone else, whatever the lens says.

Licensing and negotiation jargon

The vendor-side vocabulary the chapters use. You do not need to be a licensing veteran to use the platform, but these twelve terms come up constantly.

List price — the vendor's published price before any discount. Net price is what you actually pay; the gap between them is your discount, and benchmarks often measure it.

ACV — annual contract value: what an agreement costs per year, the number most benchmarks and blocs coordinate on.

Uplift — the percentage increase a vendor applies at renewal. An uplift cap is a contract clause limiting it; the Fair Renewal Rider indexes it.

True-up — the periodic reconciliation where you pay for usage above what you licensed. A true-down, reducing counts to actual usage, is rarer and usually only possible in the renewal window.

Shelfware — licenses you pay for but nobody uses. The optimizers in Chapter 03 exist largely to find it.

EA / ELA — an Enterprise Agreement (Microsoft's term) or Enterprise License Agreement (IBM's and others'): a large multi-year bundle covering many products, renegotiated as one deal.

ULA — Oracle's Unlimited License Agreement: deploy as much as you like during the term, then certify your deployment counts at exit to bank the licenses. The certification date drives the whole Oracle ULA playbook.

MACC — the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment: a contracted amount of Azure spend, negotiated inside the EA.

FUE — full user equivalent, the license metric RISE with SAP prices on; rebuilding the FUE count from real usage is the first move of the RISE playbook.

SOW — statement of work: the services document that carries day rates and deliverables. Priced against the market by the Rate Card Benchmark.

Third-party support — maintenance for a vendor's product bought from an independent provider instead of the vendor, typically far below the OEM rate. See the third-party support playbook.

Co-termination — aligning several agreements to end on the same date so they renew as one negotiation instead of dribbling out through the year.

TCV — total contract value: what the agreement costs over its whole term, the figure a multi-year commitment is really negotiated on. A three year deal quoted per year hides two thirds of the number.

True forward — the committed discount applying to consumption above the commitment, instead of overage billing at list. One of the reference brief's standard structural asks.

Rollover — unused committed spend carrying into the next period instead of expiring. "Use it or lose it" is the absence of this clause, and it is negotiable.

Quarter close — the end of the vendor's fiscal quarter, when discount authority runs deepest. The Vendor calendar maps every tracked vendor's.

Perpetual license — a license owned outright rather than subscribed. Old perpetual paper is a current asset, and the archive judges it as one rather than filing it as expired.

Reseller / CSP — an intermediary selling the vendor's product, sometimes on its own paper and price. Competing a direct quote against reseller and CSP quotes is what Quote Face-Off aligns.

Franken-quote — the best mix across several competing quotes, priced as if one paper. What you negotiate toward after a face-off.

Contract status path

Every proposal moves through four fixed statuses:

1. Uploaded — received, waiting for an analyst to pick it up.
2. In review — an analyst is benchmarking it.
3. Benchmarked — the final quality check before delivery. Still internal.
4. Delivered — the report is ready and you have been emailed.

FAQ

Who can see the documents I upload?
Only your own organization and our analysts. Files are stored privately, never on a public URL, and downloads use short-lived signed links. Data is isolated per organization at the database level, so another customer can never see your records.

What file types and sizes can I upload?
Analyst Benchmark and contracts accept PDF and DOCX. Limits are shown on each upload screen (proposal and contract files up to 40 MB, images up to 3.5 MB). Files are checked on type, size, and signature, not just the extension.

How is my account protected?
With your password, or, once you turn on two-factor authentication under Security, with the rotating six-digit code from your authenticator app, which then replaces the password at sign-in. Accounts with elevated access are required to use two-factor authentication. The sign-in screen also offers Remember this device for 30 days; untick it on shared machines and the session ends when the browser closes.

Why does a benchmark say "insufficient data"?
We never estimate a market position without data to defend it. When a vendor lacks reference coverage, the report says so plainly and names the one step that closes the gap, usually adding a list price or seat count in that vendor's benchmark tool.

What is the difference between an instant benchmark and an analyst benchmark?
An instant benchmark is self-serve: you answer a few questions and get a market comparison immediately. An analyst benchmark is a deliverable our team produces from a document you upload, with metrics, ranges, and a written narrative.

Can I try the platform without entering real contracts?
Yes. Load the sample portfolio from the dashboard to explore populated screens, and remove it in one click. Sample rows never mix with your real data.

How do I move around quickly?
Press Ctrl or Cmd K anywhere to open the command palette and jump to any page, tool, or vendor. Press Ctrl or Cmd J to open Vera over whatever you are looking at. The round help button at the bottom right explains the current screen.

Which actions are limited to org owners?
Inviting and managing members, connecting integrations, configuring single sign on, setting branding and notification rules, and data controls. Regular members can use every workspace and tooling feature but not these org-level settings.

Do the AI features cost extra?
AI-powered features (marked "requires an AI plan" in this manual) depend on your plan including AI, and each run counts against a periodic allowance. Everything else works on any plan. Plans, allowances & limits defines every gate and cap, and your own usage is always visible under Billing.

Which plan do I need for a feature?
The plan matrix in Plans, allowances & limits lists what each plan includes, from the Free single-contract decoder to Enterprise's included analyst benchmarks and advisory sessions. Every tool is free to explore with sample data on any plan.

How do referrals work?
Every account has a referral code under Referrals. Refer a company and earn 10% of their spend for their first 12 months.

Something is broken, or my question is not here.
Start with Troubleshooting, which walks the most common symptoms. Otherwise message our team from Chat (the "Vera AI team" thread) or email info@vendorbenchmark.com.

Next: Chapter 09 · Record & detail pages