Stipulate is licensed software that reads the arithmetic on a past-due commercial account and finds the provisions that move the cost of enforcement off the creditor and onto the debtor. The creditor collects its own debt, in its own name, and keeps everything it recovers.
This is why the account is written off. Not because the claim is weak — because the math is. Figures are illustrative; enforcement cost varies with forum, posture and how hard the debtor fights.
Nothing about the claim changed. The provision that reassigns the cost was already in the agreement — nobody read for it, because reading every contract by hand costs more than the claims are worth.
What it reads for
The engine ingests the governing contract and the account facts, then reports what is actually available — with the citation, so the finding can be checked rather than trusted.
Prevailing-party and fee-shifting clauses, collection-cost provisions, contractual interest and late-charge terms, and the venue and notice conditions that govern whether any of it can be invoked.
Prompt-payment acts, mechanics lien rights, and payment-bond claims attach by operation of law and do not require a clause in the agreement at all. On the right facts they carry more weight than anything the parties negotiated.
Several states rewrite a one-way attorney-fee clause into a mutual one. Read correctly that is often a gain: a clause drafted to pay only the customer becomes available to the creditor, and in California the resulting award is mandatory rather than discretionary. Read carelessly it is a loss, because a creditor's own one-way clause becomes available to the debtor.
Which way it runs depends on who drafted the clause and in whose favor, so the engine records the direction and the exposure for each provision rather than treating every fee clause as an asset.
It also discounts the award rather than banking it. Under § 1717(b)(2) there is no prevailing party where an action is voluntarily dismissed or dismissed on settlement — and a negotiated payment is the ordinary successful outcome here. The fee is leverage in the demand; it is not expected recovery, and a model that booked it as recovery would overstate every California claim it touched.
Where the claim stays
The structural choice that makes the rest workable: Stipulate is licensed to the business that already holds the receivable. It is not a collection agency, not a litigation funder, and not a law firm.
A business collecting its own debt is a first-party creditor. That places the activity outside the federal debt-collection statute, outside state collection-agency licensing, and away from the unauthorized-practice, champerty and fee-sharing questions that constrain every model built on buying claims or appearing on them.
Coverage
Limitations periods and prompt-payment provisions are compiled from primary statutes for all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Where a claim type and jurisdiction pair is unseeded, or where the period turns on a condition the record does not establish, the engine returns unverified and routes the account to a person.
That is the deliberate behavior, not a gap. A deadline engine that produces a confident date for every input produces wrong dates silently, and a missed limitations period is the one error in this business that cannot be corrected afterward.
Who licenses it
Factoring companies and mid-market accounts-receivable and credit departments come first: they already hold the paper, already have the customer relationship, and already write off the sub-economic tail as a cost of doing business. Construction suppliers, freight brokers and insurer subrogation units follow, where the statutory hooks are strongest.
Licensed as an annual subscription with a success fee on recovered dollars, so the software is paid for out of money that was not previously being collected.
Evaluating it
Evaluation is done against a licensee's actual aging file rather than a sample: the engine reports, per account, the tier it falls into, the governing deadline with its citation, the hooks it located, and whether it would work the claim or release it — with the reasoning attached to each. What it finds in a real portfolio is the only useful measure of whether this is worth licensing.
Access is arranged directly. The engine runs on Stipulate's infrastructure; the underlying library is not distributed.
To arrange an evaluation, write to bryan@stipulatesystems.com.