Procedures

Memory holds what is true about your company — who a customer is, what was agreed, what a word means here. It holds almost nothing about how the work is done: what a chargeback dispute involves at your company, what month-end close actually is, what has to happen before an inbound touches the pipeline.

That is the half a new joiner spends six weeks inferring, and the half an assistant otherwise guesses at. It is the Jargon problem one level up: not what a word means, but what the sequence is.

A procedure is three things and no more — what it is called, the moment it applies, and the steps in order:

Name	Chargeback dispute
When it applies	A cardholder disputes a payment
Steps	Find the charge in Stripe · Gather the evidence from the order and the delivery · Reply to the customer within 48 hours

Short on purpose. The way a procedure store fails is that nobody reads it, and a stale procedure is worse than none because it misdirects with authority.

Three states

A procedure is a draft when somebody has written it down, adopted when somebody stands behind it, and retired when it is no longer how the work is done.

Only an adopted procedure reaches the assistant. Writing one down is not the organisation agreeing that this is the way, so the two are separate acts — and the assistant can only ever write a draft. Adopting is a person's decision, because somebody has to stand behind a procedure before the model is told it is how the company works, and that somebody cannot be the model.

Retired rather than deleted: why something used to be done a particular way is worth keeping, and a procedure that comes back is easier to reinstate than to rewrite.

How the assistant uses them

Every adopted procedure contributes one line to the assistant's prompt — its name and when it applies. The steps are not in the prompt; the assistant reads them with memtro_procedures when a procedure turns out to be relevant to what you asked.

That split is deliberate. Putting every procedure's steps in front of every question would spend the prompt on your month-end close each time somebody asks about a refund. What cannot be worked out by searching is that a procedure for this job exists at all — so that is what the prompt carries, and the body is fetched on demand.

What a procedure is not

Three things, and the assistant is told all three:

• Not an order. Where what you are asking for differs from the procedure, you win — and the assistant says the procedure reads otherwise, rather than quietly doing it the old way.
• Not a permission. A step saying "refund the payment in Stripe" does nothing unless that action has been granted to the team (Teams and permissions). The assistant stops at the step it cannot take and names it, rather than finding a way round. This matters: a procedure is the one place where a colleague's words are meant to steer a run, so if adopting one could widen what the assistant may do, whoever writes procedures could grant themselves anything.
• Not necessarily current. Adopting a procedure asks how long before somebody should look at it again. Past that, it is marked as needing a check, and the assistant says so when it follows one. Correcting the steps clears the last check automatically — what somebody verified was a different procedure.

Whose way of working

A procedure belongs to the whole organisation, or to one team where only that team works that way. A team's procedures are invisible to everyone else: they do not appear in another team's prompt, their steps cannot be read, and they cannot be adopted or retired from outside. How support handles a refund is not how finance does.

Writing them

Two ways, and the second is the one that will actually keep the register current:

1. On the Procedures page. Name, trigger, steps, one per line.
2. In a conversation. When somebody explains how a job is done, the assistant records it with memtro_record_procedure as a draft for a person to adopt. Correcting one works the same way — tell the assistant the sequence has changed and it rewrites the steps.

Write the trigger as the moment it applies rather than the purpose. "A cardholder disputes a payment" is what a later question gets matched against; "to handle disputes well" is not.

Switch it on under Organisation → Features. There is no nightly pass and no model calls of its own: a procedure is written by a person, or by the assistant when somebody explains one. The tools are in the tools reference.