Payment schedules tied to user-acceptance screenshots let vendors claim completion once the dashboard renders, regardless of whether nightly feeds from legacy systems have ever run.
The contract treats the first successful login as evidence of readiness. Actual record counts, error rates and retry logic stay outside the acceptance criteria, so the invoice clears.
Consultants who wrote the original specification now price the fixes under a separate variation bucket. Their incentive is to minimise the number of variation requests they themselves have to approve.
Procurement teams learn to pad the initial scope with every interface they can name in advance. Unknown mappings discovered after go-live become budget fights instead of planned work.
The result is a delivered platform that sits in read-only mode for months while the organisation negotiates the real data movement that justified the purchase.
Next time the same vendors bid, they repeat the pattern because the metrics that matter to the buyer are still screenshots and login counts, not sustained data throughput.
Shift the trigger points to measurable data volumes and error budgets that persist for at least one full financial quarter after the first invoice. Only then does the contract actually punish incomplete integration.