Which tool do I use?

The platform has more than a hundred features, and nobody should have to learn that map. This chapter is the finder: every feature listed under the job it does, with the situations it answers phrased the way you would say them. Scan the group that matches what you are trying to do, find your situation in the left column, and the right columns name the tool and where it lives.

Five faster ways to the same answer:

• The Tool finder screen. Open Tool finder from the Tooling group in the menu on the left: the same index as this chapter, with a job dropdown, a situation search, and a Start button on every result.
• Ask Vera. Press Ctrl/⌘ J anywhere, or the Ask Vera button at the bottom right, and say what you are trying to do in your own words. She names the one tool that does it and links you straight there.
• The command palette. Press Ctrl/⌘ K and type what you want. The palette matches tools by what they do, not only by their names.
• The upload. If your starting point is a document and you do not know which analysis it needs, drag it anywhere onto the window and a chooser asks what you want done with it, or drag it onto the ask bar at the top of Home and ask about it in your own words.
• The More catalog. The More entry in the menu on the left lists every destination in the workspace, grouped and searchable.

Routes below are workspace paths: open them from the menu, the palette, or by appending them to app.vendorbenchmark.com.

The index currently covers 103 features and 229 situations.

Check a price or a quote

You have a number, a quote, or a proposal, and you want to know how it compares to the market.

The tools in this group

• License position in 24 hours (/same-day-elp). Pick the vendor and product, upload the entitlements and the data its guide asks for, and your effective license position comes back within 24 hours: the AI drafts it, a licensing analyst reviews every line and a second analyst QA checks it.
• Ask a human (/human-benchmark). Upload the document, select what you need back, and a VendorBenchmark analyst benchmarks it by hand within 24 hours: a benchmark, a negotiation strategy, talking points, research, a full analysis, or a call, any or all of them.
• Benchmark Library (/benchmarking). Self-serve price benchmarks for hundreds of vendors and product lines: type your deal, see where it lands against the market, no upload needed.
• Second opinion (/tooling/second-opinion). Upload a contract and get a benchmarked second opinion in minutes: your placement against the peer set, the savings available priced, five arguments that work, and three priced paths.
• Quote Face-Off (/tooling/quote-faceoff). Upload two or three competing quotes for the same need: equivalent SKUs aligned into one board, every line benchmarked, and the best mix across all quotes priced.
• Proposal comparison (/tooling/proposal-comparison). Upload two vendor proposals and see exactly what changed: every pricing change priced, every term change read, each marked improved, worse, or unchanged.
• Rate Card Benchmark (/tooling/rate-benchmark). Upload a services rate card or SOW and see every day rate against the market band per role, region, and vendor tier, with the annualized overpay per line.
• Portfolio benchmark (/benchmarking/portfolio). Your whole vendor portfolio placed against the market in one standing view, with scenarios and the savings each would unlock.
• Benchmark all my vendors (/reports/vendor-benchmark). One AI-written report that benchmarks every vendor you track and ranks the gaps.
• Analyst benchmark (upload a proposal) (/contracts/new). Upload a contract or quote and a human analyst benchmarks it and delivers a written report.

Review a contract before you sign

You have a document to read: a contract, an MSA, a statement of work, or two versions to compare.

The tools in this group

• Contract Agent (/tooling/contract-decode). One window for the contract, the master agreement and the statement of work: the document as pages with every suggested change on it, the language to ask in, the money on each change, the terms against the market, and the redlined file for the vendor.
• Contract time machine (/tooling/time-machine). Upload last year's contract and this year's for the same vendor and get the real story: terms won, protections that quietly disappeared, and the price walk line by line.
• Compare (/contracts/compare). Two contracts side by side as their pages, from your computer or from the documents on file, every change lit by direction, a decision on each, the summary, and the reply Vera drafts.
• Coverage (/contracts/coverage). Must-have clause coverage across the whole estate: which contracts carry the protections you require and which are missing them.
• Clause library (/clause-library). Preferred clause language, fallback positions, and walkaway lines, ready to paste into any negotiation.
• Review tables (/review-tables). Ask one question and have it answered across every contract you store, as a table.

Run a renewal

A renewal is coming, and you want the calendar, the plan, and the vendor-specific playbook.

The tools in this group

• Deal Agent: calendar (/deal-agent?view=cal). Every agreement sorted by expiry with its notice window, status, and automatic team alerts when a window opens.
• Deal Agent: Plan (/deal-agent?step=plan). The plan for one renewal: the position, the options and the talking points, dated from the notice date.
• Deal Agent: Vera's desk (/deal-agent?view=vera). Hand the renewal calendar to the VendorBenchmark team; fees are charged on verified savings.
• Vendor calendar (/vendor-calendar). Every vendor's fiscal year and quarter ends on one timeline, so you time asks for when reps need deals.
• Deal Agent: terms and the rider (/deal-agent?step=terms). A standard addendum that caps uplifts and locks renewal protections, ready to attach to any deal.
• Microsoft EA renewal playbook (/tooling/ms-ea-renewal). The Microsoft EA renewal run end to end: scope the cycle, load the estate, work E5, Copilot and Azure MACC savings, and finish with the CFO case.
• Adobe ETLA renewal playbook (/tooling/adobe-etla). The Adobe ETLA renewal end to end: Admin Console evidence, inactive seats cut in the only window allowed, GenAI padding decomposed, the VIP alternative priced.
• IBM ELA playbook (/tooling/ibm-ela). Renew the bundle or right-size out: IBM's quote decomposed line by line, shelfware S&S dropped while keeping perpetual licenses, ILMT remediated before it becomes audit leverage.
• Anthropic EA playbook (/tooling/anthropic-ea). The Anthropic enterprise agreement run on your own usage: model mix right-sized, caching and Batch wired, the commitment sized off your forecast with rollover and price protection.
• Oracle ULA certification playbook (/tooling/oracle-ula-certification). Renew or certify, decided on numbers: assess the position, maximize deployments before the count, work the certification rules, and exit with the licenses banked.
• RISE with SAP playbook (/tooling/rise-with-sap). The move from ECC or on-premise S/4HANA to RISE, end to end: the FUE count rebuilt from usage evidence, SAP's offer decomposed, alternatives priced, a five-year TCO case.
• Salesforce SELA playbook (/tooling/salesforce-sela). The SELA renewed on your numbers: the Unlimited base segmented against real usage, add-on shelfware cleared, the Agentforce commitment sized to measured burn.
• ServiceNow renewal playbook (/tooling/servicenow-renewal). Renew on your numbers, not theirs: the discount benchmarked against the corridor, idle seats trued down in the one window allowed, the uplift capped.
• Workday renewal playbook (/tooling/workday-renewal). The Workday renewal negotiated on the market: the discount benchmarked against the peer corridor, the bundled expansion decomposed, worker bands trued to reality.
• Third-party support playbook (/tooling/third-party-support). Move stable OEM support to third-party support on your terms: eligibility decided product by product and a blind tender run across providers.
• Case Rooms (/case-rooms). One case for each contract: its terms, its benchmark, the timeline, a strategy for what you want, the talking points, the research and the people, with every app opening on that contract.

Negotiate the deal

The negotiation is live, or about to be, and you want preparation, leverage, and support in the room.

The tools in this group

• Vera Deal-Room (/tooling/dossier). Upload one contract and the whole negotiation package assembles itself: the deal placed against the market, the decoded ask list, an analyst brief, the tactics playbook, live vendor intel, and the priced walk-away alternative.
• Deal Agent (/deal-agent?view=board). Each live deal tracked with a mandate, counters, tactic analysis, a concession ledger, and reply drafts.
• Vera AI-run negotiation (Case Mode) (/cases/new). Pick the vendors, hand over the contacts, approve the mandate, and Vera runs the negotiation herself, checking in for decisions.
• Competitive Quotes (the Quote Fleet) (/negotiation/fleet). An agent negotiates a set of tail vendors at once, collecting bids and pushing each toward the benchmark.
• Build competitive scenarios (/tooling/competitive-scenarios). Name the product you are renewing and get the credible alternatives researched and three to five cost scenarios priced against the renewal, with ready-to-send emails.
• Buying blocs (/blocs). Join other buyers renewing the same vendor in the same window to negotiate from combined volume.

Cut software spend

You own a budget number and need to find, plan, and capture the savings.

The tools in this group

• Budget draft (/tooling/budget-draft). Next year's software budget drafted from your stored estate: current annual cost per vendor, contracted uplift caps, the deals repricing before the year closes, and one line of reasoning per number. Every figure reads from your agreements and contracts; vendors with no stored value are listed as unpriced, never guessed.
• Spend Agent: Savings (/spend-agent?room=savings). Every opportunity across the estate ranked by money, at floor, target and stretch: unused licenses, rates above what comparable customers pay, overlapping tools, increases at renewal, invoices paid twice, each with its evidence, the contract behind it and the date it must be decided by.
• Spend Agent: Spend (/spend-agent?room=spend). Where the money goes, by category, vendor and business unit, read from your contracts and your ledger, with the checks on the ledger (invoices paid twice, price steps, paid above the contract) and the rows behind every figure.
• Anomalies (/spend-agent/anomalies). Spend and billing anomalies surfaced across the estate: spikes, drift, and things that changed without a signature.
• Invoices (/spend-agent/invoices). Invoice line-item intelligence: invoices reconciled against contracts, overbilling flagged, recovery tracked.
• Commitment Studio (/tooling/spend-studio). Size Claude, OpenAI, Copilot Cowork, and Agentforce commitments from your own usage exports, and price the committed-spend deal before you sign.

Licenses and cloud

Usage-driven right-sizing: seats, cores, and cloud workloads measured against what you pay for.

The tools in this group

• M365 License Optimization (/tooling/m365-optimization). Upload your M365 usage export to find inactive accounts, right-size E5/E3/E1, and size Copilot, with a per-user reassignment plan.
• VMware VCF licensing calculator (/tooling/vcf-licensing). Upload your RVTools export to size the VCF cores Broadcom will bill, build three pricing scenarios against real discount bands, and get a negotiation playbook.
• Oracle ERP Cloud pricing calculator (/tooling/oracle-erp-pricing). Pick the Fusion ERP cloud services on your order from Oracle's published price list, set the quantities, apply a discount, and see the net fees to Oracle a year, the term cost under an uplift, and the deal's tier on the Fusion discount ladder.
• Oracle HCM Cloud pricing calculator (/tooling/oracle-hcm-pricing). Pick the Fusion HCM cloud services on your order from Oracle's published price list, set the quantities, apply a discount, and see the net fees to Oracle a year, the term cost under an uplift, and the deal's tier on the Fusion discount ladder.
• Cloud cost optimizer (/tooling/cloud-cost). Upload a cost export from AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI and get a FinOps assessment: identified savings by workstream and a phased action plan.
• Cloud workload comparator (/tooling/workload-compare). Describe your workloads or import an inventory and see what each costs on AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, and the optimal placement across the portfolio.

Handle a vendor audit

An audit letter arrived, or you want to be ready for one.

The tools in this group

• Audit letter decoder (/tooling/audit-decoder). Upload the audit letter the moment it lands: who is actually auditing you, the deadline as a business-day countdown, what is demanded versus implied, the three things not to do first, and the response plan.

Know your vendors and the market

Standing intelligence: how your vendors behave, what they are changing, and what other buyers see.

The tools in this group

• Vendors (/vendors). Every vendor you track as a briefing: position, spend, contracts on file, and how they behave in negotiations.
• Vendor scorecards (/scorecards). A renewal scorecard per vendor: how they price, how they negotiate, and what a strong outcome looks like.
• Research (/research). The research library: negotiation toolkits, market outlooks, terms benchmarks, and vendor assessments, downloadable.
• Market news (/wire). The vendor news feed: pricing moves, licensing changes, and market events filtered to vendors like yours.
• Policy watch (/wire/policy). Vendor licensing and product-terms documents monitored for changes, diffed daily.
• Vendor Radar (/vendor-radar). Every vendor change matched to the contracts you hold and priced.
• Your watchtower (Terms Watch) (/wire/watch). Your vendors' terms, billing, and price lists watched for drift, with alerts tied to your own estate.
• The Monday briefing (/vendor-radar?room=research). A weekly written report per vendor you follow: what moved, what it means, what to do.

Organize contracts and documents

Getting the estate in: filing, tracking, searching, and keeping the data healthy.

The tools in this group

• Contracts (/archive). Upload a whole contract folder and Vera files it by vendor, extracts the terms, and briefs you on what the estate contains.
• Contract Office: Contracts (/office?room=contracts). Every signed agreement in one list: vendor, value, renewal and notice date, and the files, feeding renewals and spend automatically.
• Proposals (/contracts). Every uploaded contract and quote with its status from upload to delivered report.
• Vault (/vault). Secure project workspaces for sensitive documents, with per-project access.
• Document Agent (/doc-search). Find a word, a phrase or a vendor across every contract and document you store; the clauses come back as crops of the page, with the page number, ready to filter, open, copy and export.
• Report extract (/tooling/report-extract). Everything document search has read across your contracts as one Excel workbook: your fields, a SAM tool layout, or your own template filled.
• Document clusters (/doc-clusters). Your documents grouped automatically by similarity, so duplicates and families surface.
• Data health (/data-health). Extraction quality across the estate: what is complete, what is missing, and what needs review.
• Spend Agent: Portfolio (/spend-agent?room=portfolio). The whole estate against the market in one view: every vendor sized by spend and colored by how its contracts compare, with the notice dates of the next fifteen months.
• Enterprise Uploader (/migration). One guided run that brings an entire contract estate across: upload folders, ZIP archives and your register spreadsheet, or connect SharePoint, Google Drive or Box. Everything stays in staging, invisible to alerts, digests and agents, until an owner signs it off.
• Diligence (/diligence). An M&A diligence run over a target's software contracts: exposure, change-of-control, and synergy, in a clean room.
• Spend Agent: Board (/spend-agent?room=board). The year's moves as a board from Found to Realized, and the board pack: the decisions the committee is asked to make, each with the ask, the risk, the date and the recommendation, shared with everyone in the workspace.
• Rights register (/obligations). The rights and entitlements you already paid for, harvested from your contracts, with deadlines to use them.

Prove savings and report up

Turning outcomes into evidence: verified savings, deliverables, and executive reporting.

The tools in this group

• Documents library (/studio). Every delivered report, brief, and export in one library, with sharing and history.
• Report Studio (/report-studio). Any of 80 reports for the board, the CFO, the CIO or procurement, or one you build, written from your own data in front of you and checked figure by figure; read as a dashboard, presented as a boardroom deck, exported to Excel, Word and PowerPoint, or run as a ready made pack.

Buy something new

Net-new purchases: requests, sourcing, bids, and approvals.

The tools in this group

• Sourcing (/sourcing). The sourcing pipeline from request to award: suppliers fielded, bids collected and scored, the decision documented.
• Deal pricing (/sourcing/desk). Intake and triage for deals: what came in, who owns it, what happens next.
• Requests (/requests). Purchase requests from the business, captured and routed.
• Approvals (/approvals). The approvals queue: deals waiting on a decision, with the negotiator's recommendation attached.

Work with your team

Coordination: who does what, where discussions live, and what is waiting on you.

The tools in this group

• Tasks (/tasks). The team's task list across deals, renewals, and projects.
• My work (/my-work). Everything waiting on you personally: tasks, approvals, mentions, and renewals.
• Team (/team). Who covers what: vendor ownership and coverage across the team.
• Board (/board). The internal discussion board: questions, decisions, and wins, kept where the work is.
• Chat (/chat). Direct messages with your team inside the workspace.
• Notifications (/notifications). The notification feed: everything that changed that you asked to hear about.
• Saved (/saved). Your reading list: every report and research paper you bookmarked.
• Support (/support). Support tickets with the VendorBenchmark team.
• Referrals (/referrals). Your referral code and earnings: refer a company and earn a share of their first-year spend.
• Your engagements (/delivery). Service engagements you run with the VendorBenchmark team, in one workspace shared with your members.
• Advisory (/advisory). Book analyst time and advisory sessions.
• Services (/services). What each service beside the platform covers and how long it takes: implementation, configuration and integrations, support tiers, training and professional services.

Put AI to work

The assistant and the agent workforce: standing watches, scheduled reports, and automated jobs.

The tools in this group

• Vera AI (/vera). The assistant over your whole workspace: ask anything about your contracts, vendors, and the market, and be routed to the tool that does the job.
• Specialists (/specialists). Vera and twenty AI specialists you talk to out loud or in type: a negotiator per vendor family, the discipline seats, and the one who plays the vendor so you can rehearse. Say what is happening and the right seat answers, briefed on your documents and your placement.
• Live call (/call). The live line: talk to a seat before a vendor call, keep them on a private ear during one, or send the named seat into the meeting itself. Every call is kept, written up, and resumable.
• Agent Center (/agents). Your AI workforce: standing watchdogs, scheduled analysts, autopilots, and the wizard to build a new agent from a sentence.
• Workflow agents (/workflows). Multi-step automations chained from the platform's tools, run on triggers or on demand.

Set up and govern the workspace

Owner and security jobs: members, integrations, approvals, and the trust posture.

The tools in this group

• Deployment (/settings/deployment). The three ways to run Vera AI, shared SaaS, your own instance or your own customized environment, and what each asks of your team.
• Members (/settings/members). Invite teammates, set roles, and manage access (org owners).
• Integrations (/settings/integrations). Connect SAM, ITAM, SSO directories, spend systems, and email connections so the workspace fills itself.
• API (/settings/api). API keys and the MCP surface for wiring the platform into your own systems.
• Security (/settings/security). Two-factor, sessions, SSO, audit log, data controls, and the security posture view.
• Deal approvals (/settings/approvals). Approval rules: which deals need whose sign-off before they close (org owners).
• Notification settings (/settings/notifications). Exactly which alerts you receive, all strictly opt-in.
• Trust center (/trust). How your data is isolated, encrypted, and handled, written for your security team.

Keeping this chapter current

This chapter is generated from the platform's use-case index, the same source Vera uses to route "which tool should I use?" questions, so the manual and the assistant always give the same answer. It regenerates whenever the index changes.