How It Works
Officer Actions
The decisions an officer can record against a pending item: approve, reject, or open the explanation. What each one does and what it leaves behind.
Two decisions and a reading
Items that require a person appear in a review queue. An item arrives there for one of two reasons: a categorization scored below the 85% auto-apply threshold (see Confidence), or the work product is of a kind that requires an officer's assent regardless of how confident the system was — a prepared filing, for instance.
An officer has two decisions available — Approve and Reject — and one way to read the item before deciding: Explain. The surface is deliberately narrow. A queue that offers a dozen gradations of assent produces records nobody can interpret later; a regulator asking whether an officer approved something wants an answer, not a spectrum.
Approve
Approving records that a named officer assented to the proposed action, and stamps the record with who approved it and when. The item leaves the queue.
Approval is an act of a person, not a state of a document. This is why the approving officer's identity is stored rather than a flag: the question that gets asked, months later, is never “was this approved” but “who approved this.”
Reject
Rejecting withholds assent. The item stops requiring approval and leaves the queue, and the proposed action does not take effect.
Rejection is not deletion. The proposal was made, and the record that it was made and declined survives.
Explain
Explain opens the recorded basis for the item: the reasoning stored at decision time, the rules cited, the confidence held, the alternatives scored, and the evidence relied on. It changes nothing.
It is listed alongside the two decisions rather than treated as a detail view because of what it is for. An approval given without reading the basis is a rubber stamp, and a system that made stamping easier than reading would be optimizing for the wrong thing. See Reasoning and Evidence.
What an action leaves behind
Officer decisions do not overwrite anything. Where a decision affects the organization's financial record, it is appended to the ledger as a new entry — classification.overridden when a person replaces an automated categorization, filing.submitted when an officer advances a filing. The original decision keeps its place and its hash. See The Ledger.
Corrections also accumulate into the organization's own history, and this is the part with compounding consequences. A recorded override becomes precedent, and precedent is the dominant input to future confidence scores. An officer who corrects a vendor's categorization is not only fixing one row; they are raising the confidence of every future decision about that vendor and lowering the odds the same question is ever asked again.
The institutional effect is the point. Knowledge about how this organization treats this counterparty ordinarily lives in a treasurer's head and leaves when the treasurer does. Recorded as precedent, it stays with the organization.