Free-Text Requisition Helper & Maverick-Spend Deflector

The problem this kills

Maverick spend is rarely malice. It is a buyer who needed a thing, did not know there was already a contract for it, and bought it from whoever showed up first in a search. By the time procurement sees it, the order is placed, the off-contract price is locked in, and the rebate or volume discount you negotiated is gone.

You have the data to prevent this - a catalog, contract prices, preferred suppliers by category. It just lives in a spreadsheet nobody opens at the moment of need. The requester types "10 boxes of nitrile gloves, large" into a blank requisition field and never sees that you already have a contracted line for exactly that, at a better price, from an approved supplier.

This tool puts the right answer in front of the requester at the exact moment they are asking the question - and quietly makes going off-catalog a deliberate, approved decision instead of an accidental leak.

What you'll build

A small internal web app where:

• A requester types their need in plain English ("need a cordless impact driver, 18V, two batteries").
• The tool instantly suggests ranked catalog matches using fuzzy keyword matching - no machine learning, no model training, just smart text matching against your own catalog.
• Each match shows the preferred / contracted supplier, the contract price, the unit of measure, and the SKU - and compares the contract price against the requester's own cost estimate so the savings are obvious.
• The requester either picks a match (flows straight through) or chooses off-catalog, which forces them to pick a reason.
• Off-catalog or non-preferred-supplier choices route to a category manager for approval before anything is committed.
• Every committed requisition line is tagged catalog vs. off-catalog with the chosen supplier, so you get a live off-catalog rate metric instead of a once-a-quarter audit.

It runs in a weekend, and it works even if you have no integration to your ERP yet.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A discovery interview that runs first. Before it builds anything, the plan has the AI agent interview you about your catalog, your SKU and naming conventions, your approval rules, your categories, and your messiest edge cases. It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you give a thumbs-up, and only then does it build a tool shaped to your procurement reality - not a generic template you have to bend to fit.
• Step-by-step build instructions, each ending in a ready-to-paste prompt for your AI coding agent.
• The fuzzy-matching logic for turning free text into ranked catalog suggestions.
• The off-catalog reason picker and the category-manager approval queue.
• The contract-price-vs-estimate comparison and the off-catalog-rate dashboard.
• A duplicate guard so the same SKU can't sneak onto one requisition twice.
• A "No API yet?" fallback: load your catalog and preferred-supplier list from Google Sheets / CSV and export tagged, committed requisitions as a clean CSV in the exact columns your purchasing system expects.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is not a search box. It is a control that happens to be helpful. Built in every time:

• Login so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own catalog and requisitions.
• A complete audit trail - who searched, who picked what, who approved, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: off-catalog and non-preferred-supplier choices are drafted by the requester but cannot commit until a category manager reviews and approves them.
• Duplicate guards: the same SKU can't be added twice to one requisition, and the same requisition can't be committed twice.

Who it's for

Category managers and procurement leads who are fighting maverick (off-contract) spend that comes not from rule-breakers but from people who simply didn't know the preferred source existed. If you have contracts and a catalog but no easy way to put them in front of requesters at the moment of need - this is for you.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.