Account
New here? Read how Mandate keeps an agent's spending under your control. How it works
Mandate
Awaiting your approval
Set your mandate first. Searching and requesting purchases start once you have chosen a budget. Use the button above to set it up.
Search the web yourself. This works even when the assistant is unavailable, and every request still goes through your mandate and PayPal approval.
Product search is not set up
No search source is configured on the server. Add one and reload. Information shows what is configured.
Open InformationYou choose the budget first; nothing is built in. Then these four steps run for every purchase.
The agent proposes
You tell the assistant what you need. It searches the live web and asks to buy specific products. It can only request a purchase: it cannot spend money and it cannot set a price.
Policy checks
Before PayPal is ever called, a rule engine checks the request against your mandate. A failed check blocks it and shows exactly which rule said no.
You approve
An allowed request becomes a PayPal order. You approve it yourself with the PayPal button under Awaiting your approval. High-value orders ask you to type the amount first. Nothing is paid until you do.
The server captures and audits
After you approve, the server captures the payment, re-checks the amount, and records every step in the Ledger and the audit trail. Refunds take two steps and a short cooling-off delay.
What the policy checks
- Active The mandate has not expired.
- Category The product's category is one you allowed.
- Not a duplicate You are not already buying the same item.
- Seller The seller is not blocked, and is on your allowed list if you set one.
- Under cap The price is within the per-purchase cap.
- Within budget Enough budget is left, counting orders still waiting for approval.
- Daily limit Today's spending (last 24 hours) stays under your daily limit, if you set one.
- Pace The assistant has not asked too often this hour.
Where prices come from
Search providers only suggest pages. The server opens each page itself and reads the price the retailer publishes. Anything it cannot verify is skipped, and a price older than six hours is refused as stale. The assistant never supplies a price.
What the assistant can and cannot do
Can
- Search for products
- Read your mandate
- Request a purchase
- Suggest a change to your limits (you decide)
Cannot
- Spend or move money
- Set or change a price
- Approve its own orders
- Apply a change to its own limits