Stages, Actions, and What “Done” Means

A stage in a workflow isn’t a free-form description. It’s a structured definition: required actions, optional actions, exit conditions, an SLA in hours and the role it is assigned to. That structure is what makes the engine deterministic — and what makes “tested” on a listing mean the same thing on Monday as it did on Friday.

Required and optional actions

Each stage names the actions that must happen before it can be left and the ones that may. Diagnostics requires the category checklist to be run; Inspection & Grading requires grades; Data Erasure requires the erasure action with its evidence. Optional actions — photography, valuation — can be done in the stage without holding it hostage. The workflow detail page under Settings shows this per stage, together with the exit conditions in plain words: “Completed”, “Certificate present”, “Grade assigned”.

Completion criteria

The platform does not accept a “complete” toggle without the criteria being met. Testing cannot be completed while a required check is open. Grading requires the four sub-grades — functional, cosmetic, battery, data — plus the overall grade and a disposition. Trying to advance an under-tested asset surfaces the gap instead of a green tick. That is only annoying until it stops you selling “probably ok” as “tested”.

When a required test fails

A required check set to fail never unlocks “Complete testing”; that button stays disabled on purpose. Instead the tester gets Complete as failed, which asks for a destination — recycle or harvest parts, scrap, or return to client — and a reason of at least ten characters. Resale is not on that list: a device that failed a required test cannot enter sellable stock by this route. If the device is repairable, it stays in the queue, gets repaired, and is tested again. After confirmation the queue item reads tested with result Failed, the asset carries the chosen destination, grading becomes optional, and both the sales-layer projection and the ready gate keep the device out of stock. The decision is written to Activity fail-closed: if the log cannot be written, the status change is rolled back.

Exit artefacts

What survives when the stage completes. For erasure: the evidence on the asset and a data grade — D3 is certified erasure with a certificate, D2 a secure wipe without one, D1 a factory reset, and D0 means the data is still there. Only D1 to D3 pass the ready gate. For grading: the grades, the criteria version they were scored against, and a status flip to graded. Testing notes and photos added on the Notes & photos tab are saved on the asset itself, under the tester’s name, and show up on the inventory detail and in the evidence package. Some artefacts are documents, some are state changes, some are downstream records — a draft settlement, a listing. All of them are rows, none of them are memory.