Field Notes - Dec 19, '25

Executive Signals

• Windowed beats always-on: staged cutovers reduce holiday risk and false alarms
• Logs over silence: canceled-with-reason entries turn auditors into allies and prevent reruns
• Email is an API: forward-only parsing beats inbox auth and scraping
• SLA-safe by design: re-enable early so pollers catch upstream drops

Engineering

Stage the Cutover Window

For monthly compliance automations, treat activation as a ceremony. Go live with the compliance lead, verify cutoff logic yields zero runs, then turn it off until the safe window. Re-enable 48–72 hours before the upstream batch so pollers are warm when cases drop.

• Dry-run T-3 business days; expect zero jobs due to cutoff
• Re-enable 48–72 hours pre-batch; keep pollers watching
• Disable during holiday/low-cover periods; stage with the compliance lead

Audit Trail for Past-Cutoff Cases

After the monthly cutoff, don’t silently ignore late cases. Exclude them from the run, stamp Canceled with a note citing the cutoff, and let the next cycle regenerate clean. This avoids phantom reruns on day one and keeps auditors calm.

• Pre-agree status taxonomy with compliance; codify “Canceled: Past Cutoff”
• Automate cancel + reason; block reruns of stamped records
• Ensure the scheduler skips any record already stamped as past-cutoff

Email-to-Webhook Parsing Beats Inbox Scraping

When a vendor only emails the reference ID, treat email as transport, not storage. Use mail rules to forward only the relevant messages to an inbound parse endpoint, extract the ID, and write it back to the CRM. Keep manual entry as the first-run fallback if parsing lags.

• Whitelist sender/subject; forward to a parse endpoint; reject everything else
• Write parsed IDs to CRM; trigger a manual task if missing after X hours
• Avoid full inbox access; prefer least-privilege scopes and explicit logs