A ledger of what your agents were allowed to spend.
When an AI agent buys on someone's behalf, the authorization matters as much as the payment. Mandate Ledger is the name for the record that proves it.
| time | agent | mandate | scope | cap | amount | hash | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14:02:11 | procurement-agent-04 | intent | office supplies, Q4 | 2,500.00 | — | a91f…3c2e | signed |
| 14:02:48 | procurement-agent-04 | cart | 3 items, vendor:staples | 2,500.00 | 1,184.20 | 7be0…91aa | within cap |
| 14:03:05 | procurement-agent-04 | payment | visa ••4417, scoped token | 2,500.00 | 1,184.20 | c4d2…08f7 | settled |
| 14:09:37 | travel-concierge-01 | intent | flight BUE→IAH, economy | 1,200.00 | — | e73a…55d1 | signed |
| 14:11:02 | travel-concierge-01 | cart | 1 fare, vendor:aerolineas | 1,200.00 | 1,348.90 | 0f1c…b2e9 | exceeds cap · held |
| 14:11:02 | human:Josue Orueta | intent | cap raised to 1,400.00 | 1,400.00 | — | 5a6e…c0d3 | signed |
| 14:11:29 | travel-concierge-01 | payment | amex ••2008, scoped token | 1,400.00 | 1,348.90 | 9d44…7e1b | settled |
Why agent payments need a mandate ledger
Agentic commerce means a person or a business delegates spending to software. The agent discovers the product, builds the cart and triggers the payment. Protocols such as Google's AP2, the OpenAI–Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay all converge on the same idea: the agent acts under a mandate, a signed, scoped authorization that says what it may buy, from whom, and up to how much.
A mandate ledger is the append-only record of those authorizations and of every action taken under them. It answers the questions a merchant, a bank or an auditor will ask after the fact: who granted the mandate, what it covered, whether the cart stayed inside it, and which payment token was used to settle. Without that record, disputes, chargebacks and compliance reviews fall back on logs that were never designed to prove authority.
Identity, mandate and recourse are the three things an agent needs before it can spend money. The ledger is where the second one lives.
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1
Intent mandate
The person states what the agent may pursue and the ceiling it may not cross. Signed before any shopping happens.
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2
Cart mandate
The agent presents the specific items and price. The ledger checks it against the intent and records the match, or the hold.
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3
Payment mandate
A scoped payment credential settles the cart. The ledger links the settlement back to the intent that authorized it.
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MandateLedger.ai is the category name for this layer of the agent payments stack. It is available to the company that builds it.