Transparent by Design
The Methodology
Every signal, score, and review on Arodus follows rules we publish openly. Risk and reviews are one system here, each built to make the other earlier. This page documents exactly how the system works and will grow as new modules launch.
Peer Intelligence
The ratings on Arodus come from buyers with verifiable invoice history. ERP-verified spend is a more reliable signal than public reviews or self-reported surveys, and here is exactly how a vendor's rating is composed.
How the Arodus Score Is Built
One score from 0 to 100, showing where a vendor stands today. It combines three verified inputs, none of them self-reported.
Arodus Score = Risk + Verified Reviews + Spend Trajectory
01
Risk Sets the Score
Every vendor starts at 100 and loses points only when a verified event lands, each one linked to its source. The score leans on the worst dimension, so one serious problem is never averaged away by clean ones.
02
Verified Buyers Adjust It
The spend-weighted rating from buyers who actually pay the vendor moves the score, within published limits. Poor reviews carry more weight than glowing ones, since unhappy paying customers are the more reliable warning.
03
Spending Trajectory Confirms It
When buyers across the network quietly cut spend on a vendor, it often shows up before any news does. A sustained decline pulls the score down. Steady growth lifts it slightly.
Risk signals outweigh opinion. A vendor already in the Severe or Critical range cannot be lifted by good reviews or rising spend. Only the warning signals still apply.
01
Only Paying Buyers Count
Every rating traces to a buyer who actually paid that vendor. Receipts are the price of entry, which keeps out competitors, planted reviews, and anyone who never worked with them.
02
Ratings Reflect Active Relationships
When a buyer stops paying a vendor, their ratings stop counting toward that vendor's score. What you see reflects the buyers paying them today.
03
You Know Who Is Talking
Ratings are anonymous, but every contribution still shows the reviewer's organizational role and their verified annual spend tier, so you can judge whether the experience is relevant to your own relationship with that vendor.
04
Spend-Weighted
The final vendor rating is not a simple average. Each review is multiplied by the reviewer's verified 12-month spend with that vendor, then divided by total active spend across all reviewers. A $600k/year relationship shapes the score more than a $6k pilot, because proportional dependency is the real measure of trust.
Aggregate Rating = Σ(Score × Verified Spend) / Σ(Verified Spend)
Calculated across all active, ERP-verified reviewers.
The Six Risk Dimensions
Every vendor is scored across six dimensions using verified evidence: official records, first-party statements, and network signals. Each dimension has defined event types, data sources, and per-plan refresh cadences.
01
Operational Risk
Service outages, downtime, and degradation events, surfaced from vendor status pages and first-party disclosures, often before your team notices the impact downstream.
02
Cybersecurity Risk
Data breaches, ransomware events, and critical CVE exploits, tracked across government alerts, breach filings, and official disclosures, often before they reach the press cycle.
03
Financial Risk
Bankruptcy filings, credit rating downgrades, missed earnings targets, and acute liquidity signals, surfaced from public filings and official records.
04
Compliance and Regulatory Risk
OFAC sanctions, significant GDPR fines, active litigation, and government-mandated bans, monitored across official registries, court records, and watchlists.
05
Reputational Risk
Executive misconduct, fraud claims, and public-trust events, scored only when an official record or first-party statement confirms them. Press coverage appears in your feed, labeled, and never moves a score.
06
Strategic Risk
Major M&A activity, geopolitical exposure, and key executive departures, scored from official filings and first-party announcements.
How we verify every signal
Every signal is graded by how solid the evidence behind it is. Reported events reach your feed the day they break, so you hear about them early. Scores only move once there's a verifiable record.
Official record
Court dockets, breach filings with a state attorney general, WARN layoff notices, SEC filings, and government sanctions or exclusion lists.
First-party statement
A vendor's own status page, press release, or regulatory disclosure. A company admitting its own incident is evidence, not a rumor.
Reported
Press coverage, crowd-sourced trackers, and unverified claims. These show up in your feed the day they break, labeled unverified, and never move a score.
Every scored event links back to its primary source, the docket, the filing, the disclosure, with the article that reported it credited underneath. The full score breakdown is visible in the product beneath every score, so you can always see which events produced the number.
Data Transparency
Arodus connects via OAuth and requests read-only permissions. We read your vendor records and the bills and payments behind them, the accounts-payable side of your ledger and nothing else. You can revoke access at any time from within your ERP.
01
Vendor data
Vendor Records
Vendor name, legal name, address, contact details, vendor type, and account number. Used to build your canonical vendor list and deduplicate ERP entries, so AWS East and Amazon Web Services resolve to one vendor profile with a unified risk score.
Used for
Vendor identity, canonical mapping, deduplication, risk profile creation
02
Payment data
Bill and Payment Records
Vendor, invoice date, payment date, and payment amount in the bill's currency. We ingest at the bill level only and do not read line-item or SKU detail today. Used to verify active vendor relationships, calculate rolling 12-month spend per vendor, and determine peer review eligibility.
Used for
Spend verification, review eligibility, 12-month rolling spend, spend-weighted review aggregation
We do not read income statements, balance sheets, chart of accounts, payroll data, employee records, bank account details, or any financial data beyond bill-level payment records. Read-only access means Arodus can never write to, modify, or delete anything in your ERP.
Vendor Health Status Taxonomy
Every vendor on Arodus carries a current health status, updated automatically as verified signals arrive. Status levels define both the severity of risk and the operational response required.
See your vendors scored this way
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