Custom Time Periods for Vendors' Compensation Now Live on Flow

April 8, 2025 - Reading time: 4 minutes

We’re excited to introduce a brand-new feature on the Flow platform: Custom Time Periods for Vendors. This powerful update gives you full control over how you define and manage time blocks for different parts of the day - morning, business, and evening hours - with separate configurations for weekdays and weekends. More importantly, this is our first AI engineered addition to the platform.

Why It Matters

This feature was designed with vendor compensation accuracy and operational flexibility in mind. By customizing time periods:

• Payments become more accurate, reflecting actual hours worked during designated time blocks.

• Scheduling becomes more flexible, allowing vendors to match their availability to your real-world workflow.

• Weekend vs weekday logic ensures that hours align with regional norms and organizational policies.

• Dynamic updates automatically adjust overlapping periods, keeping schedules consistent without extra effort.

Built with AI and Prompt Engineering

This isn't just another static settings panel. The feature is powered by prompt-engineered AI, enabling smarter logic around time validation and auto-adjustments. If a start time changes, the system intelligently realigns the surrounding time blocks, ensuring consistency and reducing the chance of conflicts.

How It Works

You can now configure:

• Morning, business, and evening hours independently

• Weekday and weekend schedules separately

• Automatic validation to ensure each time range is logically consistent (e.g., end is always after start)

• A minimum time buffer between periods to prevent overlapping schedules

The Impact

For teams and enterprises working with thousands of vendors across different shifts or time zones, this update significantly enhances control and accuracy. It improves not just payment precision, but also resource planning, vendor availability management, and data reporting.