Allowance: letting an AI agent pay the bills, inside rules you set
Most vendor bills are routine, and the one that is not can cost a company tens of thousands. Allowance is a feature in a business bank account. An agent pays the routine bills, stops and asks about the ones that are not, shows why it paid each one, and leaves a day to stop any payment before the money goes.
Both are the working app, and every link in them goes to a real screen. Try stopping a payment, or open the Harlow bill.
Routine work, with a rare and expensive failure
Most of a company's bills in a month are the same vendors for about the same amounts. Someone approves them one by one anyway.
They do it because the one that is wrong can be very wrong. A criminal takes over a vendor's email and sends an invoice with new bank details. The same bill arrives twice under two numbers. An amount is far above the usual. Approving twenty routine bills to catch one of those is slow, and a person who approves twenty in a row stops reading them.
lost in 2025 to scams that trick a business into sending a payment to the wrong account, across 24,768 complaints.
FBI Internet Crime Report 2025, business email compromise
of US organisations were affected by that kind of scam in 2025.
AFP 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 465 treasury staff
of small business owners do not fully trust AI to handle low level tasks without oversight.
Bluevine survey of 942 US owners, April 2026, reported by Stacker
Today's tools flag the problem and leave every approval with a person
That catches fraud. It saves no time on the routine bills.
An agent that pays on its own is the next step, and owners do not trust it yet. So the design question is what a company needs to see and control before it lets go of the routine ones.
Where products stop today
One bill pay product describes an agent that "flags suspicious activity, like unexpected changes to vendor banking details", while "your team retains visibility and control over approvals, exceptions, and payment decisions".
Ramp, its own product page
A transfer is hard to take back
A bank can be asked to reverse a transfer only within 5 banking days, and only for a duplicate, a wrong recipient, a wrong amount or a wrong date.
Modern Treasury, explaining the US bank transfer rules
Honest mistakes cost too
Even at the best run companies, 0.8% of yearly payments are duplicates or errors. At the worst it is 2%.
APQC benchmark, reported by CFO.com, 2020
What this evidence does not show. The fraud survey covers organisations of every size and leans large, and the error benchmark is from 2020. I also looked for how long a company of this size spends paying bills and found no figure with a named source, so this page does not quote one.
One company, two people, one month
Everything on this page follows the same story, and both apps run it.
Rivera Landscape is a commercial landscaping company with 60 staff. It banks with Kinetic. By the middle of October the agent has read eight vendor bills. Five passed every check. Three did not.
Dana Okafor, accounts payable. Works through the bills at a desk. She can stop, hold and approve, but not everything.
Alex Rivera, owner. Mostly on site, with a phone. Two answers are Alex's alone: new bank details and a new vendor.
| Vendor | Bill | What the agent found | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fleetwise, fuel | $19,246.80 | Nothing. In its usual range | Paid the next morning, without asking. |
| Metro Waste, disposal | $4,180.50 | Nothing | Paid the next morning, without asking. |
| Greenline Wholesale Nursery, plants | $42,360.00 | Nothing. Paid every month | Paid the next morning, without asking. |
| Coastal Mutual, insurance | $9,860.00 | Nothing | Scheduled. It leaves tomorrow at 9:00 AM. |
| Greenline Wholesale Nursery, again | $42,360.00 | The same bill, sent again under a new invoice number. Every check on the bill itself passes | Scheduled, with a heads up that it is the second Greenline bill this month. Someone stops it before it leaves. |
| Ridgeline Stone and Gravel | $14,720.00 | Far above the $6,000 to $9,000 Ridgeline usually bills | The agent stops and asks. Dana can answer. |
| Sunbelt Irrigation Supply | $6,275.40 | A new vendor. Nobody has paid them before | The agent stops and asks. Only Alex can add a vendor. |
| Harlow Equipment Rental | $28,400.00 | The bank details on the invoice are new | The agent stops and asks. Only Alex can answer, after calling Harlow. |
The job
"Let the routine bills go without me. Stop on the ones that could hurt us, while there is still time to do something about it."
Four parts, in the bank account the company already has
The agent has three ways to act, and the whole design is about which one a bill gets. It pays quietly when every check passes. It pays and tells you when the bill is fine but something around it is odd. It stops and asks when the bill could be a fraud or a mistake. Each phone below is the working app, built with Kinetic.
Set up: three choices on one screen
The most it can pay on one bill, the most in a month, and which vendors it can pay.
The vendors offered are the ones the company has already paid, so the list starts from its own history. A sentence under the choices says the rules back in plain words and changes as they change.
- Three presets for each limit, not a number field. A preset is one tap, and nobody has to invent a figure.
- Three things are not settings at all: new bank details, a new vendor, and a bill far above the usual always stop, whatever the limits say.
Stop and ask, and ask the right person
Harlow's invoice is under every limit. The agent stops anyway, because the account it asks for is not the one the last 14 payments went to.
The screen puts the two accounts side by side and says what to do: call Harlow on the number already on file, not one from the invoice. Paying the new account needs a tick to say that call was made. Holding the bill is the first button, because it is the safe one.
- Dana sees the same stop at her desk and cannot answer it. Her button is "Send it to Alex", and it reaches his phone with everything on the page.
- "Pay the account on file" is offered too. It is often the right answer, and it is safe.
Every payment explains itself
A payment the agent made without asking still has to answer one question later: why did this go out?
Each bill lists the checks the agent ran, in words: the vendor is on the list, the bank details match the last 23 payments, it is under the limit, it is in the usual range, it fits in the month. Below that sit the bill, the invoice as it was sent, the history with that vendor, and what happened and when.
- Each check has a tick, a warning or a cross as well as its colour, and a hidden word for screen readers.
- When a person says yes to something the agent stopped on, the check stays on the record with their name beside it.
Stop it in time
Every payment the agent schedules waits until 9:00 AM the next business day. Until then, anyone at the company can stop it with one tap.
Greenline's second bill passes every check, so the agent schedules it and says it is the second this month. Stopping it takes one tap and can be undone. Once a transfer has left, the app is honest about what remains: the bank can be asked to reverse it for a few days and a short list of reasons, and after that the only route is to ask the vendor.
- The waiting day is the undo. On a card you can dispute afterwards. On a bank transfer the cheap moment to fix a mistake is before the money moves.
- Stopping asks for no confirmation, because it is the safe direction and it can be undone.
The desk works the queue. The phone gives the answers
The two designs are one app. The same screens, the same rules and the same data, laid out for where each person is.
Dana has eight bills to get through, so the desktop keeps the list on the left and the bill beside it, and nothing is opened and closed. Alex has one question to answer between site visits, so the phone opens straight on that bill with the safe button first.
List and detail together
On the desktop, bills, vendors and activity keep the list in view with the chosen item beside it. On the phone the same two screens follow one another.
Who is signed in matters
The desktop opens as Dana and the phone as Alex. The two answers that are Alex's alone show Dana a "Send it to Alex" button. The desktop can switch person, to show both.
Nothing is a dead end
Home, Bills, Vendors, Agent, Activity and Alerts are all real screens. Every row opens, every vendor has a page, and every action writes a line in the record of what was done and by whom.
Five approaches I dropped, and why
Each of these was the obvious answer from one point of view. Each one brought the problem back.
I held every option against the job: let the routine bills go, and stop on the ones that could hurt while there is still time.
Approve every bill
Why it looked right
It is what companies do now, and nothing leaves without a yes.
Why I dropped it
It saves no time, and a person approving twenty routine bills stops reading them. That is exactly when the one with new bank details gets through.
Flag, but never pay
Why it looked right
It is the safe middle. The agent does the checking and a person keeps the decision.
Why I dropped it
It is the product that already exists. The routine bills still wait for a person, so the time is not given back.
One monthly cap
Why it looked right
One number is the easiest rule to explain and to build.
Why I dropped it
A cap large enough for a month of bills is large enough for one payment to the wrong account. The checks that matter are about the bill, not the total.
Put the agent in the accounting tool
Why it looked right
That is where the invoices already are.
Why I dropped it
The bank is the only place that can hold a payment for a day, and the only place that knows which account the last 14 payments went to.
Pay straight away
Why it looked right
Vendors like being paid fast, and waiting looks like a slower product.
Why I dropped it
A transfer that has left is hard to get back. Paying at once removes the one cheap chance to catch a mistake, and no bill here was due within a day.
How I would know it worked
Allowance has not shipped, so these are targets, not results.
Each one has a reason for the number, and a plan for what to change if it is missed. The first two are about safety. The rest are about whether the time really comes back.
| What is measured | Target | Why this number | If it is missed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payments sent to new bank details without the owner confirming | Zero | This is the failure the feature exists to stop. It is not traded against anything. | Stop the release until it is fixed. |
| Wrong or duplicate payments stopped before the money leaves | 9 in 10 | The waiting day is the one cheap moment to fix a mistake. After it the bank has 5 banking days and a short list of reasons. | The heads up is not being seen. Move it from the bill to an alert, or hold a flagged payment for a second day. |
| Routine bills paid without anyone touching them | 4 in 5 | In the scenario five of eight pass every check. A real month should do better as each vendor's history builds up. | Find which check stops the most bills. The usual range is probably too tight for vendors whose bills swing. |
| Questions answered with a hold, a change or a no | At least 1 in 4 | If nearly every question gets a plain yes, the agent is asking about things that did not need asking. | Loosen the check that produces the most plain yeses. |
| Vendor bills paid late | Fewer than in the three months before | Each company is its own baseline. In one US survey 42% of small businesses said they had paid their own vendors late. | Look at how long questions wait for an answer. A bill held up by an unanswered question is late for a new reason. |
| Hours spent on bills in a month | Measured on day one and at 90 days | I found no public figure with a named source, so this is a method and not a number. | If it has not dropped, the time has moved from approving to answering. Go back to the row above this one. |
| Companies that still have it on after three billing months | 60% | One month is a single run. Three is a habit. | Ask the ones who turned it off what happened just before. |
The 9 in 10, 4 in 5, 1 in 4 and 60% figures are my own starting points, and I would expect to move them after the first months of real numbers. The late payment figure is from the Intuit QuickBooks 2026 Late Payments Report.
What the design does not solve
Three things sit outside what a screen can fix.
I would rather name them than draw a screen that hides them.
The agent has to read the invoice correctly
Every check depends on what the agent took from the bill. If it misreads an amount or an account, the explanation is confidently wrong. The invoice as it was sent is always one tap away for that reason.
A confirmed payment cannot be reversed
If Alex ticks the box and the new account was a criminal's, a payment someone confirmed is not on the list of reasons a bank can pull back. The design slows that yes down. It cannot undo it.
Who pays when the agent is wrong
If the agent pays a bill it should have stopped on, who covers the loss is a question for the bank's terms, not for this screen. The record of every check is there to make that conversation short.
What the design system already had, and what it gained
Most of Allowance is Kinetic as it stands: the phone, the activity list, the limit meter, the buttons, the status pills, the switch and the timeline.
Kinetic was built for a consumer banking app on a phone. This is its first business account and its first desktop app, and four larger pieces were missing. I built them from Kinetic's own tokens so they can go back into the system.
Checks list
One line per check, each with an icon and words, for passed, heads up and stopped.
Account comparison
The account on file beside the account on the invoice, with how many times each has been paid.
Sheet and dialog
One component that rises from the bottom on the phone and sits in the middle on the desktop. It holds keyboard focus and closes with Escape.
Desktop shell
A rail of sections and a list that keeps its detail beside it, drawn from the same screens as the phone.
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