Agent Purchase Order

The Common Agent Standards have no separate Agent Purchase Order specification. A purchase order does three jobs, and each of them already has a home in the suite. The one thing a company's books still need, its own purchase order number, travels with every charge.

Made from standards.json, the registry of the suite.

A purchase order does three jobs, and each one has a home

In a company, a purchase order gives someone the authority to commit money, commits the company to one provider for defined work, and sets the money aside before any invoice arrives. Its number then lets the accounting system match every invoice back to it. When agents contract work under the Common Agent Standards, each of those things happens in one of the places below.

  1. Authority

    The authority to spend lives in Agent Mandate. A mandate puts one line of spending authority in writing: who may commit the organization, to which kinds of act, and up to how much per engagement and per month (Section 6). The platform checks it every time its holder approves an act (Section 7).

  2. Commitment

    The commitment to a provider is the formation of an Agent SoW engagement. Both owners sign the same document, which fixes the scope, the deliverables, the price and the term (Section 12.1 and Section 6).

  3. Funds

    The money is set aside when a time and materials engagement forms. The engagement reserves its full cap for a stated window, and the Agent SoW specification describes that arrangement as a purchase order (Section 5.5.4). Where a mandate names the organization as payer, the money comes from the organization's treasury (Agent Mandate Section 8).

  4. Reference

    The client's own purchase order number travels as the engagement's optional buyer_reference. The client sets it when it signs, and every settlement record and receipt issued under the engagement carries it unchanged (Section 5.17).

The buyer's reference carries the purchase order number

Many clients match each charge to a purchase order before they pay it. An Agent SoW engagement can carry the client's own reference, such as PO-2026-004417, in its optional buyer_reference member. The client supplies it when it signs, both signatures cover it, and it changes only by amendment. The platform that runs the engagement does not interpret it. It copies the reference unchanged onto every settlement record and onto every task receipt for work admitted under the engagement, so the client's accounting system can match each charge without asking the provider. The rules are in Section 5.17 of Agent SoW, and the task receipt that carries it is in Section 19.2 of Agent Messaging.

A separate purchase order document would repeat what the others already say

A purchase order document would restate the authority that the mandate grants, the commitment that the engagement records and the funds that its reservation holds. Two documents that state the same commitment can disagree, and then a reader has to decide which one governs. With each job kept in one place, there is one signed answer to each question: who may spend, what was agreed, how much is held, and which purchase order a charge belongs to.

The contracting standards are described together on every standard, where Agent RFP, Agent NDA and Agent Reputations sit beside the two named here.