Transparent by design
The methodology
Every event, rating, 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
Inside verified reviews
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.
What every vendor record shows
Three verified inputs sit side by side on every vendor you pay. None of them is self-reported.
Verified events · Spend-weighted rating · Network spend trend
01
Events Are the Record
Every event carries its evidence tier, the date it happened and a link to its source. Your 12-month spend with that vendor sits beside it, and one click marks it Relevant or Irrelevant.
02
Verified Buyers Rate It
The spend-weighted rating from buyers who actually pay the vendor sits beside the record. Only buyers with verified invoice history count, so the rating reflects the people with money on the line.
03
Network Spend Shows the Trend
When buyers across the network quietly cut spend on a vendor, it often shows up before any news does. You see it as a relative trend over 12 months, never a dollar figure.
Each input shows on its own. A rating appears once enough verified buyers stand behind a vendor, and network spend once enough buyers cover it that no single account can be identified. Until then you see a dash, not a guess. Press coverage appears labeled as Reported and isn't treated as verified. Events stay on the record permanently, with their date and source.
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 follow the money
A review's weight is the reviewer's verified spend with that vendor over the last 12 months. When a buyer stops paying, their 4- and 5-star reviews stop counting. Their 1- to 3-star reviews stay on the rating, weighted by what they spent in their final 12 months, and a buyer who leaves can still post a 1- to 3-star review for 3 months after their last payment. Unhappy customers who walk away are often the earliest warning a vendor gives.
03
You know who's 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
Weighted by spend
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 rating more than a $6k pilot, because proportional dependency is the real measure of trust.
Aggregate Rating = total of (each rating × that buyer's verified spend) ÷ total verified spend
Calculated across all active, ERP-verified reviewers.
The third input: network spend trend
Reviews are what verified buyers say. Network spend is what they do with their money, read from the same verified ledgers.
What buyers do, not just what they say
Spend trajectory reads the payment behavior of a vendor's verified buyers across the network: growing, steady, shrinking, or leaving. It comes straight from ERP-verified bills and payments, so it is ledger fact, and it sits beside every written opinion. A cluster of buyers cutting spend is the earliest warning most vendors ever show.
A trend, never dollars
Network spend shows as relative movement over 12 months, never as anyone's actual figures. Falling spend and buyer departures are often the earliest sign of trouble. When ratings and payment behavior disagree, you see both side by side and make the call.
Visible once the network can see
Spend signals appear only once enough verified buyers cover a vendor, and they sharpen as coverage grows. A thinly covered vendor shows its public record alone; the network fills in vendor by vendor as buyers join.
The six risk dimensions
Every vendor is monitored across six dimensions, and every event is filed under one of them with its evidence: an official record, a first-party statement, or reporting. Each dimension has defined event types and defined data sources. Record-based evidence and network signals (outages, reviews, and spend movement) are picked up on the same daily cycle, on every plan.
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, liens and judgments, distress notices, and sustained market pricing below sector for public companies, surfaced from official records and market data.
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, verified only when an official record or first-party statement confirms them. Press coverage appears in your feed, labeled as Reported.
06
Strategic risk
Major M&A activity, geopolitical exposure, and key executive departures, sourced 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. An event counts as verified only once there's a record you can check.
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 Reported, and stay that way until a record confirms them.
Every verified event links back to its primary source, the docket, the filing, the disclosure, with the article that reported it credited underneath. Each vendor's full record is visible in the product, so you can always trace an event to where it came from.
Data transparency
You connect through OAuth, and Arodus sends read requests only, scoped in code to your vendors and what you pay them. You can revoke access at any time from your ERP.
01
Vendor data
Your vendors
Vendor legal name, category, website domain, and city, state and country. Contact names, contact emails, street addresses, phone numbers and account numbers are read for matching and not kept. The domain deduplicates ERP entries, so AWS East and Amazon Web Services resolve to one vendor profile with one event record.
Used for
Vendor identity, canonical mapping, deduplication, risk profile creation
02
Payment data
What you pay them
Bills, payments, credits and refunds with your vendors, including payments made straight to a vendor by card, check or cash: the vendor, the date, the amount, how it was paid and which bills a payment settled. Line items are kept only if you turn them on; they're off by default. Used to verify active vendor relationships, calculate rolling 12-month spend per vendor, and determine review eligibility.
Used for
Spend verification, review eligibility, 12-month rolling spend, spend-weighted review aggregation
Read-only, scoped to your vendors. The field-by-field detail lives on the Trust page and on the OAuth screen before you connect.
What triggers an alert
Alerts follow your Key vendors: your top 25 by spend are marked automatically, and you can add any others. Each trigger below is a dated fact from the record or your ledger. Reported items appear in your feed and don't trigger alerts.
How the record is kept
An event lands on the record the day it's verified, dated to when it happened and linked to its source. What happens next follows published rules: events stay put, labels change only on evidence, and nothing quietly disappears.
Dated and sourced
Every event carries the date it happened, the date it was verified and a link to its primary source. Dates show in full, so a record read months later still says exactly when. When a later filing adds to the story, like a dismissed case or a confirmed fix, it arrives as its own dated event with its own source.
Your call stays yours
Marking an event Relevant or Irrelevant is private to your workspace, logged with who marked it and when, and reversible in one click. Irrelevant events collapse out of your watchlist but stay on the vendor's record. No other buyer sees how you triaged.
Reported stays labeled
Press coverage, crowd-sourced trackers and forecasts stay labeled Reported until an official record or the vendor's own statement confirms them. When that record arrives, the event takes its verified tier and the article that broke it stays credited underneath. Nothing reported is treated as fact in the meantime, however widely it's repeated.
Quiet means watched
Every vendor shows the date monitoring began. A dimension with no events reads zero beside that date, so an empty record means the vendor was watched and nothing was found. What Arodus monitors is one published list, the same for every vendor, kept on this page. A lawsuit's demand is an allegation, so litigation shows its stage in court as the docket states it.
Nothing is erased
The event stays on the vendor's profile permanently. Anyone reading the profile still sees what happened, when, and where the record came from.
Corrections
A vendor can dispute any listed fact. If the underlying fact is wrong, most commonly an event attached to the wrong company, the fact is retracted the same day and the retraction is logged. Disputes are resolved by review of the record; filing one changes nothing by itself.
See your vendors on the record
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