Reviewing and Approving Writes

Norma never changes SAP on its own. Everything that reads is answered immediately, but everything that writes — creating a sales order, an invoice, a delivery, any document — is stopped and handed to a human first. This page explains that gate so you know exactly what happens between “Norma, create this” and the document appearing in SAP.

Why there is a gate

An assistant that could post to your live ERP unattended is a risk no business should accept. So Norma is built the opposite way: a write is held by default, and a human decides. This is a hard rule in the system’s design (ADR-0031), not a setting you can accidentally turn off. The gate is fail-closed — if the system is ever unsure whether an action is a write, it treats it as one and holds it.

How Norma decides what to hold

Every tool Norma can use declares what kind of action it is:

• Read — looking something up or running a report. These run straight away.
• Write — creating or changing a document in SAP. These are always held.

Norma doesn’t guess from the name of the action; each tool states its own kind. A read is allowed, a write is held, and anything whose kind is unknown is held to be safe.

What a held write looks like

When Norma proposes a write, the task moves to a needs-review state and stops. In the task view you see the proposed document laid out as an editable form:

• the document type (e.g. sales order),
• the customer or supplier,
• each line — item, quantity, and price,
• any other fields the document carries.

Nothing has touched SAP at this point. The document exists only as a proposal.

Approve, edit, or reject

You have three choices:

• Approve as-is — Norma creates the document exactly as proposed.
• Edit, then approve — the fields are editable. Fix a wrong customer code, a line quantity, or a price, then approve. Norma creates the document with your corrected values. The corrected arguments are re-checked by the connector before anything is posted, so a bad edit is refused just like a bad proposal — the write never reaches SAP if the corrected values don’t validate.
• Reject — nothing is created. The task ends without a write.

If you neither approve nor reject, the hold times out after 24 hours and nothing is created. Silence is safe.

One gate for everything, including scans

The same gate covers writes Norma proposes from a typed request and writes it prefills from a scanned document (see “Scanning a document to create one”). There is no second, quieter path — a document booked from a scan is reviewed and approved exactly like one you asked for in words.

The audit trail records what actually ran

Every task is recorded end to end. When a write is created, the audit trail stores the arguments that were actually used — so if you edited the proposal before approving, the record shows the corrected document, never the original proposal. You can always see who approved a write and with what values, and each task links to its underlying workflow for a full step-by-step history.

In short

Reads are instant. Writes wait for you. You can fix a proposed write before it goes in, reject it entirely, or let it expire — and whatever ends up in SAP is exactly what a human approved.