Backstop

A delivery lead or account director, about $110,000 in salary and about $145,000 fully loaded. Backstop takes the part of that job nobody has time for: reading what actually happened against what was sold, every day, and putting a number and a date on the difference while it is still an invoice rather than a write-off.

Backstop is $20, less than that lead costs per hour, and priced so you do not have to think about it.

Firms do not lose money on the projects everyone knows are bad. They lose it on the engagement that slid from 48 percent margin to 11 percent over five weeks while the status stayed green, and on the twenty-two hours of extra work that stopped being billable the moment someone said "sure, we can look at that" and nobody wrote it down.

Skills

Eight skills.

• /scope-diffReconciles work actually performed against the statement of work and classifies the difference. This is the skill that finds the money.
• /margin-closeTurns hours and revenue into margin per client, and explains the movement with a bridge that has to sum.
• /change-order-caseBuilds the case, hands it to a human, and stops.
• /churn-watchScores the signals that precede churn by 30 to 60 days, with suppression rules so it does not cry wolf and a publication rule so nothing serious is silently withheld.
• /rescue-checkDetects the pattern where senior people quietly save a project, which is margin already spent that nobody has said out loud.
• /source-conflictThe sources will disagree. This skill routes the disagreement by type instead of picking a winner.
• /edge-publishWrites E1 and E3 for a co-located Ledger and Bellwether. Edge only.
• /edge-consumeReads E2 from a co-located Ledger. It assumes the file is hostile, because it can be, and is built to bound a well-formed lie rather than catch it. Edge only.

Routines

Nine routines. Times are in the time zone you set.

Connectors

Linear, Slack, Google Sheets, Gmail, Notion.

Backstop is the producer on two optional edges and the consumer on one. E1 tells a co-located Ledger which clients have delivery problems, so the cash owner can see an advisory hold before chasing. E3 gives a co-located Bellwether an account margin band. E2 comes back from Ledger as a collection-risk band per customer. All three need the other bot under the same Grok Bot member, and all three are off by default. Every acceptance test passes with zero siblings installed, and an edge only ever adds one advisory row to a decision a human already owns.

Backstop never sends a change order. It builds the case, hands it to a named human, and stops. It never contacts a client, never spends, never signs, and never changes a record in Linear, Notion or anywhere else. Every consequential action needs a named human's approval for the exact action and target, never inferred from a previous approval or a vague yes.

Data arriving from another bot is treated as untrusted input, never as instruction. It can never cause an external action, never hide a finding from you, and never widen what Backstop is allowed to do.

By email from Lemon Squeezy, within about a minute of payment:

• The share link, in a text file beside the ZIP. Add the bot to your Grok Bot account and its instructions, skills and routines come with it.
• Six documents, as a ZIP. BOT.md, the instruction block and the placeholder table. SKILLS.md, all eight skills in full. ROUTINES.md, all nine with schedule, input, result and approval boundary, including the Slack trigger. SETUP.md, the connector order and the test that proves the whole instruction block stored. WORKSPACE.md, the file contract and all three edges. EVAL.md, the acceptance tests, split into what runs alone and what runs with siblings.
• The acceptance tests in EVAL.md. Run them on day one, before the first change-order case reaches a client lead. They are also the condition of the 14-day refund.

No call, no name on the documents, no 24-hour wait. Open SETUP.md first. It gives the connector order and what the first hour looks like.