Approvals and audit trail

Agents in os.construction propose; people approve. This page covers how approvals work, how they connect to your existing approval limits, and what the audit trail records.

The approval queue

Agent proposals land in an approval queue, filtered to what you are allowed to approve. Each item shows the agent, the record, the proposed action, the reasoning and the sources. On Riverside Medical, a PM’s queue might hold:

Agent	Proposal	Action
AP Agent	Volt Electric INV-4471 $48,200 exceeds PO-118 remaining commitment by $6,150. Hold pending CO #14.	Approve hold
RFI Agent	Send RFI-212 (missing fire dampers, L3 corridor) to the architect with photos, spec 23 33 00 and M-301.	Approve and send
Billing Agent	Pay App #9 draft, $2,310,400, SOV and approved COs reconciled. 2 lien waivers outstanding.	Approve draft
Compliance Agent	Hold Apex Steel payment until the conditional lien waiver for Pay App #9 is on file.	Approve hold

For each item you can approve, edit then approve, or reject with a reason. Rejections and edits are kept, so the agent’s next proposals can reflect how your team works.

The approval flow

Approvals follow your rules

An agent proposal never gives anyone extra authority. The person approving must be allowed to take that action themselves, within their own limits:

• If a PM can approve commitment changes up to a set amount, an agent’s proposal above that amount routes to whoever can approve it.
• If invoices over a commitment need PM sign-off before accounting can pay, that still applies when the AP agent is the one flagging it.
• If pay apps need both PM and accounting review, both reviews still happen.

See Roles and permissions.

What the audit trail records

Every change to every record, by a person or by an agent, is written to the audit trail. For agent actions, the record includes:

• The agent and the trigger that started the work.
• The proposal as it was presented, with its reasoning and source links.
• The reviewer, their decision and any edits they made before approving.
• The resulting change: which records changed, from what to what.
• Timestamps for each step.

For people, the trail records who changed what and when, on the record itself. Nothing is silently overwritten: a corrected invoice code keeps the original value in its history.

Why it matters

For your team. When someone asks “why is this invoice on hold?”, the answer is on the record: who proposed it, who approved it, and the numbers they saw.

For owners and auditors. A pay app line can be traced back through the change order and RFI that created it, with every approval along the way. That makes owner reviews, lender draws and financial audits faster to support.

For trusting agents. Teams adopt agents when they can see exactly what they did. A complete trail is what lets you start with agents on low-risk work, check their record, and widen their scope deliberately.