You have a working setup built on invented data. This chapter is about the gap between that and running real work through it.
Three things that are hard to change later
Deal with these before anybody files a real case.
1. Area names
There is no delete for an Area. Not in the interface, not in the API. Deactivating hides nothing — the row stays in the list, marked inactive.
Read your six names once more, as a colleague joining next year would. Claims is fine. Claims (new) is a decision you will regret.
2. What "required" means on each document
A required document blocks submission. That is the point, and it is also the thing that generates the angriest support request in the first week — somebody with a legitimate case that genuinely has no police report, unable to proceed.
Go through every document you marked required and ask: is there a real case that does not have this? If there is, it is not required. Required means this case cannot proceed without it, not we would like this.
3. Who can approve what
Run the test from chapter 6 against every process: can the person who assembled the case approve it?
If yes, the approval records that somebody agreed with themselves, and no amount of later configuration fixes the records created in the meantime.
The checklist
Processes
- [ ] Every process has a Default SLA, or you have decided deliberately that its cases can never be late.
- [ ] Every process has Expiry warning lead days, or has no expiring documents at all.
- [ ] Every document with a validity period has Requires expiration date on.
- [ ] Every field somebody might arrive holding is searchable.
- [ ] Two or three fields per process are filterable, and none of them are free text.
- [ ] Every field that must never reach AI is marked sensitive.
- [ ] Photographs and other "one is never enough" documents have a minimum file count.
Access
- [ ] The organisation tree matches the real one, including branches you were going to add later.
- [ ] Directors are granted with include children, not by listing departments.
- [ ] Process Scope is the rule and Members carries the exceptions — no scope was widened to reach one person.
- [ ] For one specific sensitive document, you can say who can open it and through which layer.
Genius
- [ ] At least one narrow assistant exists alongside Total search.
- [ ] You have followed citations back to source on at least three answers.
- [ ] Nobody on the team believes the assistant is checking whether a document is current. It is not — that is what expiry dates are for.
The team
- [ ] Everybody knows the one Inbound rule: when in doubt, Inbound.
- [ ] Everybody knows that a blocked submission names the missing document, and to read the message.
- [ ] Somebody owns the answer to "what does an edit do to an approval here?" — see below.
The policy question a product cannot answer for you
An approval given on Tuesday was given against the case as it stood on Tuesday.
Decide, and write down, what your organisation does when a case is edited after an approval:
- Invalidate on any change — simple and safe, occasionally annoying.
- Invalidate on material change — better, and it requires you to define "material".
Do not choose the third option by default, which is to leave approvals standing and hope nobody edits anything. That is not a policy; it is the absence of one.
Cleaning up the practice data
The setup you built following this manual has invented cases in it. Before real work starts:
- Cancel the practice dossiers. They are final and stay in the history, which is honest.
- Deactivate any Area you created while experimenting. Remember: you cannot delete it.
- Keep the processes if the templates are right. There is no reason to rebuild what works.
Where to go next
- Getting started — the three words, if a colleague needs them.
- Your first Process — the reference for every field, when you build your tenth.
- Contact us — for what this manual does not cover.
The manual describes the product as it stands. When something here does not match what you see on screen, the screen is right and we would like to know — a manual that has drifted is worse than none.