# A company card for sales, marketing and personal assistant agents _By Nakul Kelkar, September 28, 2026_ ## Give each role its own allowance A salesperson, a designer and an executive assistant spend company money on different things. Their corporate-card policies should reflect their jobs. The same applies when agents do the work. A sales agent may need company research and contact enrichment. A marketing agent may need image generation and video renders. A personal assistant may need paid research to assemble a useful shortlist. Putting all three on one unrestricted key makes it harder to control their work and understand the bill. Use a separate Vaaya key for each role, with its own spending ceiling and permitted tool categories. The keys draw on the owner's shared funding. “Company card” describes that delegated authority; Vaaya is not issuing each agent a universal merchant card. The [corporate-card model for agents](/blog/your-agents-need-corporate-cards) covers the common controls. The useful decisions here are what each worker may buy and when it should stop. ## Sales should pay for missing evidence Give a sales research agent a clear assignment: qualify a list of accounts, fill specific missing fields and return the evidence behind each recommendation. Search and Data are sensible starting categories for that work. Add other categories only when the workflow needs them. Begin with records already in the CRM. Normalize domains, remove duplicates and check which fields are still useful before buying fresh data. A returned email address does not earn its price again because another agent encountered the same account. The workflow can then request research on unresolved questions and enrich the accounts that passed qualification. Keep a per-call cost ceiling and record which field or question justified the purchase. [Vaaya's API reference](https://vaaya.ai/docs/reference) documents research, lead data and the common request format; check the current endpoint and price before starting a batch. Treat these as two separate approvals: buying information and contacting a person. Permission to enrich a record does not grant permission to email it. Keep Outbound disabled for a research-only key, and put any later sending step under the company's approved outreach rules. The sales manager should review useful, evidence-backed records alongside spend. A count of successful API requests cannot tell you whether the agent researched the right companies. ## Marketing should pay for selected drafts A marketing agent can spend its entire allowance making variations that nobody plans to use. Define the deliverable before the first render: one approved concept, the required formats and a bounded revision process. An illustrative campaign workflow starts with inexpensive text proposals. A reviewer selects a direction, then the agent buys the image or video work needed to produce it. If the result misses the brief, a revision needs a concrete change request. “Try something better” gives the agent no useful stopping condition. Give the production worker access to Media. If it also uses the LLM router, permit that category explicitly. Tool categories describe broad API capabilities; your application still needs to enforce which campaign, assets and operations the worker is allowed to handle. Keep a total for the campaign in the application, including research, generation, revisions and billable retries. A monthly key ceiling limits spending during a calendar month. It does not automatically represent the budget for a campaign that crosses into the next month, and several keys do not share one campaign allowance merely because they have similar names. When several renders run at once, account for work already submitted before approving another. Keep the output link with the charge and campaign identifier. The review should show which purchased assets were accepted, which were discarded and what remains unfinished. ## A personal assistant needs a purchase boundary Paid research is useful even when the final action stays with a person. An assistant can gather options for a work trip, research a supplier or prepare a shortlist for a team event. That buys information. A booking, order or signed commitment is a further action with its own authorization. Give a research assistant Search access and a limited allowance. Require it to return the source, timing and constraints behind each option. A hotel review is evidence about a property; it does not establish room availability or a completed reservation. ### Coming soon: direct booking and food ordering Flight booking, hotel booking and DoorDash ordering are Coming soon in this workflow. Today, the assistant can prepare the options and hand the booking or food order back to its owner. Those extensions need an exact purchase proposal before payment: traveler or recipient, dates, item or room, total price and cancellation or substitution terms. The owner must know what will be bought. After submission, the assistant needs a confirmed order state before reporting success or trying again. Keep using the available research and spending controls while those purchase flows develop. Check the [current service catalog](https://vaaya.ai/catalog) for the action a task requires before granting the assistant access to it. ## Change the policy when the assignment changes Daily, weekly and monthly ceilings are calendar limits. Pick the period to match the review schedule, and use an application-level total for a finite assignment. [Long-running and short-lived agents](/blog/budget-long-running-short-lived-agents) need different renewal decisions. Pause a worker's key when its assignment is on hold. This refuses subsequent billed calls without claiming to cancel work already in progress. Resume it when the work is approved, rotate an exposed secret and revoke the key when it is no longer needed. Keep owner credentials with the person or service that manages these policies. A worker receives its own key. For [agents deployed at a client's site](/blog/pay-for-agents-deployed-at-client-sites), agree whether the client or your business funds the work before deployment. Start with one role in [Agents](https://vaaya.ai/agents). Name the key after its assignment, choose the permitted paid categories, set the ceiling, and connect the first charges to the work delivered. ## Questions **Can different agents have different spending limits?** Yes. Create separate API keys and give each key its own daily, weekly or monthly calendar ceiling and permitted tool categories. The keys still use the account owner's shared funding. A single campaign total spanning several keys or periods needs an application-level budget. **Can my assistant pay for flights, hotels or DoorDash through these controls?** Direct flight booking, hotel booking and DoorDash ordering are Coming soon in the workflow described here. Paid research and service calls are available today, so an assistant can prepare options and hand the purchase back to its owner. **Is an agent's company card a real issued card?** Here, company card is an analogy for permission to spend. A Vaaya key carries the agent's spending identity and limits; it is not a payment-network card accepted by every merchant. The account owner retains control of funding and access.