Business plans versioned to board approval
Updated
In short
How do you take a business plan from draft to board approval with a trail an auditor accepts?
The plan lives in Kelvyn, not in a deck about it: authored in-product, versioned on every change, and carried through a governed lifecycle — draft, shared, proposed, approved, board — in which content freezes at proposed and structure freezes at approved. Custom KPIs sit on the plan, actuals are recorded against a baseline, and variance is reported as actual minus planned, period by period. When the board approves, a sealed archive package is generated automatically, and every plan version is retained immutably for ten years.
The plan is an artefact, not a document
A business plan assembled in slides is a description of a plan. The plan itself — the curves, the assumptions, the KPIs — lives somewhere else, in files that do not version together. Kelvyn holds the plan as a governed object: authored in-product, with full version history, side-by-side version comparison, and lineage that records which version descends from which.
The forecast is not attached to the plan; it is derived from it. The same authored collection curves drive the amortised-cost schedule and the projections, so approving a plan means approving the numbers, not a summary of them.
A lifecycle with teeth
The lifecycle is draft, shared, proposed, approved, board — and it is enforced, not suggested. Content freezes when a plan reaches proposed; structure freezes at approved; the only exemption is a system recalculation, which is flagged as such. A change after the freeze means a new version with preserved lineage, not an edit that rewrites history.
Recall follows a governed workflow from CEO to CCO. Direct recall from the archive is closed for every role, which is precisely what makes the archive worth citing.
Approval that ends in evidence
Board resolutions run end to end in the product — creation, voting, finalisation — with segregation of duties on signatures: an approval requires the officer's own session and their own business role, and is refused under impersonation. A system administrator cannot sign a board vote.
On approval, a sealed archive package is generated automatically: the evidence, its checksums, and an RFC 3161 timestamp over the result.
Scope
What this does not do
Kelvyn governs plans and resolutions; it is not a board portal. There is no meeting management, agenda or minute-taking function — the workflow governs the decision and its evidence, not the meeting.
Variance needs recorded actuals. They arrive through CSV and Excel imports or direct entry — there is no live connection into your accounting system pulling actuals on its own.
An approved version cannot be edited, and immutable retention means a mistake is superseded by a new version rather than corrected in place.
Questions
- Can an approved plan be edited?
- No. Content freezes at proposed and structure at approved. A change means a new version with lineage preserved — the approved version stays exactly as the board saw it.
- How long are plan versions retained?
- Ten years, immutably. Retention is enforced in the data layer rather than by a policy document.
- Who can sign the approval?
- Only the officer whose role it is, in their own session. Signature actions — 27 governed actions — are refused under impersonation and refused to the AI assistant.
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