How it works

Your rules decide every purchase — merchant locks, caps, approval gates

Stand up your own card program in minutes and write the rules that govern it. Sixteen rule kinds, no sales call, no five-figure minimum.

Four steps, and one of them takes as long as it needs.

Step one

Declare

An agent, a script or a person states what they are about to buy — merchant, amount, category. Nothing is chargeable and no credential exists.

Step two

Evaluate

Every rule in your rulebook runs. No short-circuit, so a refusal returns every reason rather than the first one.

Step three

Decide

Approve, decline, review or partial. A review parks the request and notifies a named person.

Step four

Fund

A single-use card is created and loaded to the approved amount. Afterwards it is swept and closed.

The part that is hard to copy

A person can be in the loop.

Because the decision happens before a purchase exists, there is no clock running. A rule can wait four minutes or four hours for somebody to answer.

	Inside an authorization	APPEN
Time to decide	About two seconds	As long as it needs
Ask a person	Not possible	The normal case
Call your own system	No time	A webhook, before funding
If it refuses	A decline on a live card	No card was created
What you get back	Yes or no	Every rule, and its reason

# your own system decides, before any money moves webhook_check → POST https://you.example.com/appen { "merchant": "ferguson.com", "amount": 78000, "ref": "WO-40118" } # you answer with whatever your business knows { "decision": "approve", "detail": "work order open, assigned, warranty" }

Enforcement

Where each rule actually bites.

Eight of the sixteen kinds are enforced by funding — the card never holds money it should not; condition steers branches and repeat gates the loop. Five need merchant identity, so they are enforced by issuing one card per approved purchase plus category controls. One hands the decision to you.

Eight rules

Enforced by funding

Amount, spend cap, velocity, time window, uses, cooldown, duplicate guard, approval threshold. The money is simply never there.

Five rules

One card per purchase

Merchant lock and block, category, new-merchant review, per-merchant caps. A card only ever exists in the context that approved it.

One rule

Your endpoint

webhook_check. If you can express it in code, the card can enforce it.

See all sixteen →