Reads the supply spine. Names what you've been paying.
A specialist agent over the operator's vendor reality. Imports invoices, accounting reads, and per-vendor portal exports — then surfaces three intelligence cuts on the relationships the operator already runs. Material-supply primary. Chicagoland regional spine for v0; schema accommodates other regions.
Most SMB operators have preferred suppliers. The wedge isn't vendor discovery; it's intelligence on what's already happening — has the Lurvey rep crept on triple-shred over the last six months, does this new quote sit above or below what you've historically paid, did the vendor you picked last week actually carry most of what you ordered. Operator-vs-self comparison; never scraped public pricing.
Reads beside the record, doesn't replace it. Composes alongside QuickBooks and Aspire (which already hold the vendor list) — never writes back. Spec locked May 2026. Demo-grade build opening; first sales-call surface runs on synthetic Chicagoland data while operators decide whether to wire their own.
- The wedge — intelligence on existing relationships, not vendor discovery or switching.
- The three cuts — rep-quote sanity check (lead) · intra-vendor pricing trend · multi-line breadth across preferred set (passive).
- The crew shape — four positions, named below, family-coherent with Plant Specialist.
- The regional spine — Chicagoland v0 with named real vendors (Lurvey · Wilson · Goodmark · Midwest Groundcovers · Fiore · LMF · Russo as equipment-reference) plus geography-aware swaps for west / south / north / city.
- The honesty rules — operator-vs-self only; passive framing on breadth reads; narrow-specialty vendors render in their actual scope.
- The first real operator — synthetic Chicagoland operator (Westbrook Landscape Group) anchors v0 demos; first live operator wiring calibrates the production substrate.
- The agent realization — v0 demo surfaces run deterministic logic; production swap to LLM-driven Catalog Reader · Spend Reader · Intent Matcher · Intelligence Surfacer comes when the first operator crosses over.
- The other regions — schema is multi-region capable; deeper non-Chicagoland vendor sets layer in when prospects outside the spine surface.
- The seam to the Bid Arc — substitution analysis where commercial specs name sole-source vs approved-equal vendors is held; the seam opens after Vendor v0 lands and the Bid Arc Tier-2 stabilizes.
Four positions. One specialist agent.
The crew shape is locked against the Plant Specialist family blueprint. The math is deterministic in v0 demo; production realization swaps to LLM-driven agents per position with the same input/output contracts.
The Vendor Catalog
— Reads who they are. Reads what they actually carry.
Loads vendor records from the regional catalog — name, location, category mix, program scope (operator-declared, not scraped), purchase rhythm, narrow-specialty flags. Pure read; never invents fields. Conserv FS stays turf-only; Possibility Place stays native-only.
The Purchase Corpus
— Reads what you've actually paid. Returns the math, not the opinions.
Computes aggregations over the operator's imported purchase corpus — spend by vendor by period, spend by item by vendor, price history by item. Token-overlap matching at threshold 0.4; below threshold, returns no-match rather than guessing. Carries a confidence block (corpus days · source mix · trend-meaningful flag) on every read.
The Operator Gesture
— Reads what the operator's asking. Routes the work.
Classifies operator input into one of four intents — pricing check · quote sanity · breadth query · vendor summary. Extracts vendor refs, item names, period, quote input. When confidence drops below 0.6, returns a clarifying prompt instead of guessing. Validates vendor references against the operator's own vendor list; unknown vendor routes to ambiguity.
The Operator-Facing Read
— Composes the answer. Names the verdict. Holds the honesty rules.
Composes the surface payload from Catalog + Spend + Intent outputs. Applies honesty discipline: trend-forming caveat when corpus < 90 days, passive framing on cross-vendor opportunities, narrow-specialty exclusion from breadth comparisons, no public-pricing claims, no switching prescriptions. Returns Surface A (vendor card) · Surface B (item trend) · Surface C (quote sanity) per intent.
The four reads on the specialist.
Spec locked May 2026 against substrate accumulated through real Chicagoland vendor research, founder reframe, and Plant Specialist family blueprint. Demo-grade altitude — operator-runtime Live is a separate spec downstream.
A material-supply intelligence layer over the operator's existing vendor reality. Three lead cuts: rep-quote sanity check, intra-vendor pricing trend, and passive multi-line breadth across the preferred set. Demo-grade in v0; sales-call surface runs on synthetic Chicagoland data when no live operator has crossed over yet.
Three import paths — PDF invoice ingestion (highest fidelity, 24-hour OCR), QuickBooks read-only credentials (immediate, vendor + date + total), per-vendor portal exports (where operator has online access). 90-day minimum for trend-meaningful cuts; below that, trend-forming caveat. Four-position agent crew routes the work and composes the read.
For the SMB owner-operator who already has preferred suppliers and wants intelligence on what's actually happening at them. First operator profile anchors Chicagoland west-suburb design-build at the ~$4M band; the schema scales to other regions and other sub-segments without changing shape.
Vendor data lives in three uneven places: invoice PDFs, accounting systems, and supplier portals. None of them surface rep creep, none of them check a quote against history, none of them ask whether last quarter's preferred vendor actually carried what you needed. Vendor Specialist reads all three and surfaces what the operator can already feel but can't easily name.
“Reads the invoices. Joins the accounting.
Returns what you've actually been paying.
Names the verdict. Never prescribes the switch.”
— VENDOR SPECIALIST · spec locked · build opening · 2026-05