Autonomy without controls is a risk. Finance teams need a clear, auditable way to define how agents are allowed to spend.

The core controls

Merchant/category allowlists (e.g., cloud, LLM APIs, data providers)
Max per-transaction and rolling monthly caps
Time-of-day and day-of-week windows
Geographic restrictions
Pre-approval flows for transactions over thresholds

Eventing and audit trail

Every authorization decision should produce a structured event: policy matched, rule ID, amounts, counterparty, and the agent/workflow context. This makes reviews fast and automated.

Progressive rollout

Start with read-only policies (observe only), then flip to enforce. Add alerts for anomalies (sudden velocity spikes, new merchants, mismatched categories).

Developer ergonomics

Policies should be versioned, testable, and deployable like code. Provide a local simulator: give me a merchant, MCC, amount, and agent ID and tell me pass/fail + which rule fired.

These guardrails let teams move fast with agents in production — safely.