A proposal's life is short and fully visible on the Action Agent page:
- Proposed. It waits, with its details and its proposer named.
- Review & confirm. Opening a proposal shows a live preview: the exact records it will touch, computed at the moment you open it — not a claim stored when the proposal was written, which might since have gone stale. Confirming and executing are one step: the work happens there and then, the proposal becomes executed, and the records it created are linked on it. A proposal cannot be confirmed twice; the second attempt finds it already executed and is refused.
- Review & amend. Three kinds of proposal — draft purchase orders, draft sales orders and draft stock adjustments — can be edited at review, not just accepted or refused. The review opens the proposal's own details as a form, filled in exactly as proposed: the party, the currency, and for orders each line's product, quantity, unit of measure, warehouse, price and the recorded source of that price — and the proposal's working (how parties and prices were arrived at) shown read-only above it, so what you are changing is never a mystery. Correct a quantity, reprice a line, swap a warehouse; a price you clear stays blank, exactly as a deliberately blank price does. When you confirm, the amended details are checked again, the live preview runs again — if the amendment cannot run, for instance because the supplier has since been made inactive, it is refused by name and the amendment stays open for you to fix — and only then does the work happen. An amendment never quietly rewrites history: the original proposal is replaced by the amended one, the two stay linked (the list's Outcome column and the review card say so), the declaration "Amended by {your name} before confirming" is recorded on the amended proposal, and for an order it is written into the created draft's notes as well. Confirming without changing anything is simply a plain confirm of the proposal as proposed — no replacement is made. The same Review & amend button sits on the Ask AI proposal card (§2.13), beside Confirm and Discard, and works through exactly the same door.
- Rejected. A person looked, and said no. The proposal keeps the record of who and when.
- Expired. A proposal left untouched for 24 hours expires. Nothing is lost by expiry — the same proposal can simply be made again, against fresher facts.
- Failed. If the work itself throws an error midway, the proposal is marked failed and the error is kept on it, in the open, rather than leaving a half-done action unexplained.
Every step of that life — proposal, preview, confirmation, rejection, execution, and what was created — is written to the activity trail, so "who set this in motion?" always has an answer.
Figure 2.4 — An Action Assistant proposal. Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: a proposal open at Review & confirm — its live preview listing the exact records it will touch, with the Confirm and Reject actions.