Vendler

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Vendler

Here is the project story formatted as a single, cohesive narrative:

The Autonomous Vendor Relations Agent was born from the realization that while modern finance departments have automated their accounting ledgers, the actual communication between humans and vendors remains a chaotic bottleneck. Accounts Payable teams are often buried under a mountain of dispute emails, forced to manually cross-reference vague complaints against complex PDF contracts and fragmented payment histories. This manual "digging" is not only slow but also leads to costly overpayments and strained relationships. Our project solves this by transforming the dispute resolution process into an autonomous, data-driven workflow. Instead of a passive chatbot, we built an agent that actively monitors incoming communications, analyzes them against company policy, and generates a data-backed resolution.

The technical architecture of the system is built on a robust Node.js and TypeScript backend that functions as the "brain," utilizing LLM agents to parse unstructured email text while simultaneously querying structured SQL payment records. We implemented a sophisticated confidence-scoring logic that determines the agent's autonomy: low-risk, clear-cut disputes are resolved instantly, while high-risk or ambiguous cases are routed to a custom "Human-in-the-Loop" dashboard built in Retool. This dashboard allows a human controller to review the AI’s justification, inspect the cited payment history, and approve or edit a pre-drafted response with a single click. To bridge the gap between our local backend and the cloud-hosted Retool interface during development, we leveraged ngrok to create a secure, real-time tunnel. The result is a system that ensures a perfect audit trail, reduces the workload for finance teams by hours each week, and ensures that human expertise is only utilized where it provides the most value. By turning vendor relations from a reactive fire-drill into a proactive engine, we are redefining the standard for autonomous operations in the enterprise.

Built With

• authropic
• claude
• macrospcopic
• retool
• sonnet