06 / For business

Set the route once.Use it again.

A plan records what you are sending, which internal desks approve or sign, the order they act in, and what the recipient needs to return. Reuse it for repeat work, or skip the plan for a one-off send.

Approval chains · payroll runs · quorum sign-off · standard letters · repeat sends

In the app

One run

Quarterly statements · 12,400 recipients

Drafted Approved Sent Complete

Every desk that approved it is on the record, with the person and the time.

  1. Define

    You write the rule once, not once per send

    The document type, the order of approval, the people, and what has to come back. Set it up once and it is the same every time, which is the part that fails when the process lives in somebody's head and that person is on leave.

  2. Approve

    You keep the sign-off inside your own building

    Your desks approve in your order, with a quorum where you need one. The approval and the document that went out are one object, rather than an email thread and a PDF that somebody has to match up in March.

  3. Repeat

    You run it again without rebuilding it

    The same plan, the next quarter, the next intake, the next payroll. Or no plan at all when it is a one-off letter, because not everything needs a process and a tool that insists otherwise gets worked around.

The approval that lives in an email thread is the one nobody can find in March.

What a plan says
What kind of document, who approves it, in what order, and what you need back.
Who approves
A named person, a group with a quorum, a group in your own directory, or somebody outside the company.
What is recorded
Each approval as it happens, with the person, the time, and the note on any rejection.

The detail

What can a desk actually be asked to do?
Approve, sign, acknowledge, or contribute, which is a desk that has to attach something without deciding anything: the valuation, the credit memo, the site photographs. Rejecting is available wherever approving is, it stops the route and sends the file back, and it requires a written reason. The next person to open a rejected file is whoever has to fix it, and "rejected" on its own tells them nothing.
How does a committee sign off?
Put the group on the desk and set how many of them have to act. It is an absolute count and never a proportion, so "two of them" cannot quietly become "one" because somebody left. Point a desk at a group in your own directory and the membership is read from your provider at the moment the desk opens rather than from a copy: if that read comes back with fewer people than the quorum needs, the desk opens blocked and says so, rather than waiting forever on approvals that can never arrive.
Can somebody outside the company approve something?
Yes. An external party is a first-class kind of desk, for the counsel, the auditor or the counterparty who has to sign off before it goes out.
How do runs start?
By hand from the portal, from your own systems, or on a schedule you write as a cron expression, evaluated in Lagos time unless you say otherwise. Every plan can be run over the API whichever you choose. There is deliberately no watch-this-folder trigger: connected storage is read when you use it and never mirrored, so there is nothing to watch.
Does the person acting have to say which desk they are answering?
No, and they cannot. The act discharges whichever desk is open, worked out on our side. A client that could name the step would be asserting which desk is open, and anything that can assert that can sign for a desk that moved on ten minutes ago.
Do I have to build a plan for everything?
No. A one-off letter needs no plan at all. A tool that insists on process for a single letter is a tool people route around, and the routing around is what puts the approval back in an email thread.

The limit

A plan is your process, not ours. Keepable will not tell you who ought to approve a loan letter, and it does not replace the system where the underlying decision was actually made. What it does is carry the sign-off and the proof of it, so that the approval and the document are the same thing rather than two records somebody has to reconcile later.

Start here

Gwada shi

For developers: Plans reference.