Stop digging through contracts. Just ask.

August 2026

Your contracts already hold the answers. The problem is getting them out. Which vendor is quietly your biggest commitment? What renews in the next 90 days? What does the termination clause in the Acme agreement actually say? Today, answering any one of those means opening a folder, scrolling a spreadsheet, and reading a PDF twice. By the time you have the answer, the question has changed.

So we built Ask Fratera — an assistant that sits on top of your contract data and answers procurement questions in plain language. No filters to configure. No report to build. You type the question the way you'd say it to a colleague, and you get an answer with the receipts attached.

Ask your whole book of contracts

Most contract tools make you become an analyst before they'll tell you anything. Ask Fratera flips that. You ask; it answers from the live data.

• "Who are my top vendors by committed spend?" — a ranked answer built from your real value schedules, not a guess.
• "What's auto-renewing in the next 90 days?" — the renewals that are about to spend your budget on autopilot, before the notice window closes.
• "Which live contracts does Sarah manage?" — accountability in one line, no org chart required.

And it composes. Manager, supplier, business unit, lifecycle stage, dates, auto-renewal, your built-in fields and the custom ones you defined — stack them into one question. "Show me in-force IT contracts over €50k that renew before year-end." That's a query you'd normally hand to whoever owns the spreadsheet. Now it's a sentence.

Ask a single contract what it actually says

Portfolio questions are half the job. The other half is the one contract on your screen right now. What's the notice period? Is there a price-increase cap? What are we actually on the hook for?

Point Ask Fratera at a contract and ask. It reads the document and answers in plain language — and it shows you the passage it read. Every answer about a contract's contents comes back with the exact quoted lines from the actual file, so you're never taking the assistant's word for it. You're reading the clause, faster. It's the difference between "the AI says 90 days" and "here's the sentence that says 90 days."

To be clear about the line we draw: Ask Fratera tells you what your contract says. It doesn't hand out legal opinions or negotiate for you — that's your call to make, now with the facts in front of you instead of buried in a PDF.

It only answers what you're allowed to see

Here's the part that matters when the tool touches every agreement in the company. An AI assistant that can read all your contracts is a liability if it answers everyone equally. Ask Fratera doesn't.

Every question runs with the asker's own permissions. If a contract is restricted and you can't see it, the assistant can't see it either — it won't summarise it, count it in a total, or admit it exists. A contract you're not cleared for is indistinguishable from one that isn't there. The same access rules that protect your records everywhere else in Fratera protect them here, with no exceptions carved out for the AI.

And it doesn't make things up. The numbers — spend, renewal dates, totals — are computed by Fratera, not invented by a language model. The assistant's job is to understand your question and point at the right data; the data itself comes straight from your database. So the answer isn't a plausible-sounding estimate. It's your actual number, with a link back to the record it came from.

Procurement-first, by design

This is the payoff of building a contract tool procurement-first. Fratera treats vendors as a first-class hub, not a tag on a document — so "top vendors by spend" and "everything I owe Acme across every order and amendment" are questions the system was built to answer, not bolt-ons. Ask Fratera is what that foundation feels like when you finally talk to it.

It's the same principle behind everything we build: enterprise contract-management capability without enterprise-suite cost, complexity or implementation time. You should not need a dedicated contracts analyst just to find out what renews next month.