Open Arsenal

Don’t Let the Deadline Decide.

PrePayGuard is an open source AI specification designed to help people stay ahead of bills, invoices, statements, and other payment obligations. Rather than functioning as a simple bill reminder, PrePayGuard continuously monitors the entire payment lifecycle, from the expected arrival of a statement through payment preparation, authorization, processing, and confirmation. It can read bills and statements in multiple formats, including PDFs, scanned documents, images, screenshots, spreadsheets, digital invoices, and email notifications, while using AI to identify amounts, due dates, billing cycles, account information, and payment instructions. The system is designed around a simple principle: Don’t Let the Deadline Decide.

A central feature of PrePayGuard is its payment timeline intelligence. The AI works backward from the creditor’s due date to determine when information must be received, when the user must review or approve a payment, and when the payment must be initiated to allow sufficient processing time. It can learn recurring statement cycles and recognize when a statement that normally arrives shortly after a billing-cycle closing date has not appeared. For example, if a statement normally closes on the 24th, PrePayGuard can monitor for the statement during the following days and ask the user whether it has been received if it is missing. AI can extract information from the statement and prepare entries, while human-in-the-loop controls allow the user to verify and approve financial information before consequential actions occur.

PrePayGuard also provides account balance and payment distribution protection. The system does not treat a positive bank balance as automatically available for spending because upcoming payments, outstanding checks, pending transactions, transfers, and protected reserves may already commit some of those funds. It projects future balances, identifies potential overdrafts, detects situations where multiple payments compete for the same money, and specifically monitors outstanding checks to help prevent bounced checks. When an account needs additional funds, the system can coordinate authorized accounts and calculate potential transfers while considering processing time and minimum balance requirements. Users can establish account-specific reserves, payment priorities, preferred accounts, backup accounts, and approval rules, allowing the AI to coordinate finances without silently taking control of the user’s money.

PrePayGuard is designed as a modular financial safety system with human control at its center. Optional modules can provide bank integrations, payment execution, calendar coordination, notifications, cash-flow forecasting, deposit monitoring, subscription detection, invoice management, business accounts, local AI processing, and advanced automation. Every important financial event can maintain provenance and an audit trail, including where information came from, what the AI extracted, what the user approved, when a payment was scheduled, and whether the payment was actually confirmed. By combining advance warning, payment deadline intelligence, account balance coordination, overdraft protection, check protection, failure recovery, and human authorization, PrePayGuard aims to prevent financial problems while there is still enough time and money to do something about them.

This specification is released under AGPL-3.0+ and is free to use with required Section 7 attribution. Attribution-free deployment is available through a Specification Branding License, with fees based on deployment scope and network size.