Signing off a report
How a reviewer approves or rejects a draft today, what the audit trail records, and what the full sign-off workflow ships in M3.
Sign-off is the moment a reviewer says "this draft is the report". Pre-pilot, sign-off is intentionally lightweight: a single Approve action that flips the assessment status and stamps the audit trail. The full workflow (named-reviewer signature, hallucination-guard hard gate, PDF and Word export, audit lock) ships with the M3 release. This page is the short reference for both the present and what is coming next.
The three statuses sign-off cares about
A draft moves through three statuses that matter for review:
| Status | What it means | Who acts here |
|---|---|---|
| Drafting | The assessor is still capturing observations and editing paragraphs | Assessor |
| In review | The draft has been submitted for a second pair of eyes | Reviewer |
| Signed | A reviewer has approved the draft | Reviewer (terminal) |
Drafting moves forward via Submit for review, which adds the row to the reviewer queue and flips status to in review. The reviewer then takes one of two actions: Approve draft flips status to signed and ends the loop, or Reject with note flips status back to drafting and stamps a short note for the assessor to address. The full paragraph-level threaded comments table is M3 work; pre-pilot the single rejection note carries one round-trip of feedback.
Submitting a draft
The assessor opens the report viewer and clicks Submit for review. The button shows once at least one paragraph has been generated. Clicking it flips the assessment status to "in review" and adds the assessment to the reviewer queue. The assessor can keep editing paragraphs and adding observations while review is in progress; the workbench does not lock against late changes.
Approving a draft
The reviewer opens the queue, picks an assessment, walks every paragraph (Edit, Switch to human, Regenerate, Show source as needed), and finishes with Approve draft. The button is visible only to users with the reviewer or admin role; assessors see an "Awaiting reviewer" chip in its place.
Approval is one click, idempotent, and final. The status flips to "signed", the row drops out of the reviewer queue, and the report viewer shows a green "Approved" banner with the reviewer who signed.
Rejecting a draft
If the reviewer wants the assessor to make changes before sign-off, they click Reject with note instead of Approve. A dialog opens for a short note (up to 2,000 characters) explaining what to change. Confirming flips the assessment status back to drafting and stamps the rejection.
The assessor sees three signals when they next open FRA Flow:
- A bell notification ("Your draft was sent back") on every page, linking straight to the report viewer.
- A "Sent back Xh ago" chip on the visit row.
- A rose banner on the report viewer showing the note in full.
The note clears automatically when the assessor re-submits via Submit for review, so the loop reads as a single thread of feedback rather than a stack of comments. The full paragraph- level threaded comments table is the M3 home for richer review conversations.
What the audit trail captures
Every paragraph in the report has its own audit row that survives sign-off. The trail records, for each paragraph:
- Who authored the prose (AI / human / edited mode).
- Which observations the AI was given (declared inputs).
- Which observations the AI claimed to have used (evidence used).
- The model version and prompt hash, so a future replay can reproduce the prompt that wrote the paragraph.
- Timestamps for both the paragraph generation and the reviewer's approval.
A regenerate before sign-off updates the audit row with the new audit fields and snapshots the prior version into a one-step undo (the Restore previous button on the paragraph card). A regenerate after sign-off is not allowed in M3; today the workbench still allows it because the audit lock is part of the M3 work that has not landed.
What changes in M3
The M3 release lifts sign-off from "status flip" to a full defensible workflow:
- Named-reviewer signature. Approve captures the reviewer's name and a typed confirmation, stamped against the assessment. The audit trail keeps the signature alongside the paragraph audit.
- Hallucination-guard hard gate. The Approve button blocks if any paragraph has high-risk evidence missing from the AI's declared input set, or if the model fabricated a citation. The reviewer can either edit the paragraph or override the gate with a typed reason that goes into the audit trail.
- PDF and Word export. Approve generates a PDF and a Word copy of the report, branded to the tenant. Both downloads sit on the report viewer for the assessor and reviewer.
- Audit lock. Once signed, the assessment is read-only. Future amendments go through a documented re-issue flow that preserves the original signed copy.
- Email to the landlord. Approve sends the PDF to the landlord contact attached to the property, with a covering note from the tenant.
Pre-pilot: what to do today
Until M3 ships, the practical workflow is:
- Assessor finishes capture, generates the draft, hits Submit for review.
- Reviewer walks the paragraphs in the queue, edits or regenerates anything that is wrong, and clicks either Approve draft or Reject with note.
- After sign-off, the report is read-only inside FRA Flow. The action plan has a Copy as Markdown button next to its heading so you can paste a clean priority-grouped list straight into an email to the landlord. Full PDF and Word export ship in M3.
Two things to watch in this interim period: (1) the assessor can still edit paragraphs after sign-off because the audit lock is not in place, so the reviewer should approve only when they are genuinely happy; and (2) the audit trail captures the right fields even before the formal sign-off ships, so a paragraph edited after Approve is recorded with a fresh timestamp that makes the late edit visible.
Roles required
- Assessor can submit a draft for review. Cannot approve.
- Reviewer can approve a draft. Cannot submit one for themselves on a peer review (peer-reviewed practices typically separate assessor and reviewer; self-reviewed practices set the assessor as their own reviewer in Settings).
- Admin can do both. Useful for solo practitioners and small teams.
The role assignment is a tenant-level setting. See users and roles for how to change it.