Your billing agent sends invoices that look right. Most of them are. That’s the trap.
The failure is quiet: the agent drops a line, picks a code that undercharges, skips a required tag. The bill goes out short. You lose money. And because the miss is rare and the invoice looks normal, your monthly spot-checks never catch it.
The fix is borrowed from the cockpit. Pilots run a pre-flight checklist — a hard stop right before a one-way action, confirming the few things that prevent the biggest crash. Sending a bill is one-way too. So stop the agent before send: compare each key line to the recorded work, hold the bill if anything doesn’t match.
The principle scales. Any agent doing something irreversible — sending, paying, committing — earns that same hard stop. Not a sample audit after. A check before, on the lines that cost the most.
One catch: the check only works if the underlying work was logged well. Pre-flight before send, for now.
InTheValley senior engineers know how to build the pre-flight stop for the agents you’re already running.
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