What a run should leave behind

When a person does a task, they leave traces: an email, a note on the file, a memory of why they did it that way. When a workflow does a task, it leaves exactly what it was built to leave. So we build it to leave a lot.

Every run keeps its receipts

Each run of a Vector & Frank workflow records:

1. what came in — the invoice, the email, the form,
2. what each step did with it, in order,
3. what the judgment step decided, and on what,
4. who approved anything that went to a person, and when,
5. the outcome, and what it was billed as.

Why bother

Because the promise is that you can check what it did yesterday. That promise is only as good as the record behind it.

It pays off in three places. When somebody asks why a payment went out, the answer is one click away. When a step starts going wrong, you can see exactly which runs it touched. And when the auditors come round, the workflow is the easiest part of the business to explain.

Trusting a process and checking a process should feel the same. The run history is how they do.

The record is also where improvement starts. Every case the gate sent to a person is a case somebody could teach the workflow to handle next time.