Correcting a submission

A submitted entry has already published its figures — to dashboards, charts, tiles, balances, exports and period summaries. Correcting one is therefore a different act from editing a draft, and Trackapt treats it differently.

The two ways to save a correction

When you edit a submitted entry, you are offered two outcomes.

	Save draft	Submit
Where the change goes	A private buffer on the entry	Published
What everyone else sees	The old figures, unchanged	The new figures
Readings republished	No	Yes
Balance alerts re-evaluated	No	Yes
Required-field check	Skipped	Applied
Blocks approval	Yes	No

The published figures never flicker

Until you publish, everything outside the form filler still reads what was originally submitted. A half-finished correction cannot leak into a dashboard, and it cannot quietly move a balance.

Working on a correction

1. Open the entry and edit it.
2. Save draft to put your work in the buffer and come back to it.
3. Reopen it later — the filler shows your buffered work rather than the published figures, and a banner says whose it is.
4. Submit to publish. The buffer is cleared at that moment.

If somebody else has already buffered a correction on the same entry, the banner names them before your work replaces theirs.

Filing or discarding it from the submission

The submission's own screen carries a banner while a correction is waiting, and it offers both actions:

• Submit Saved Changes — publishes the buffer. The same outcome as reopening the form and pressing Submit.
• Discard — throws the buffer away and leaves the published figures alone.

Both live on the submission, not only in the filler

Saving a correction is not the end of the job — publishing it is. Until it is published, the warning stays up, the items go on showing the superseded figures, and the entry cannot be approved, so you can file it from here without reopening the form.

Discard is here too because a buffer does not extend the edit window: once the window shuts, the filler redirects you away, and the submission's screen is where a buffered correction can still be cleared.

Approval is blocked while a correction is pending

An entry carrying an unpublished correction cannot be approved. Publish it or discard it first.

This applies to the account holder as well. The rule is not about authority — it is about what a signature means. Signing an entry whose figures somebody is midway through changing would attest to a document that is about to say something else.

The edit window

A submitted entry can be corrected for 7 days, and an approved one not at all. Correcting needs Level 2 clearance and being the member who filed the entry — or Level 6 or Admin clearance, which may correct anybody's.

For deleting, the account holder is exempt from both halves — the window and approval. Clearance roles — Admin, Level 6 — do not qualify. The reason for the exemption is narrow and worth stating: without it, an entry approved in error would be permanent, with its wrong figures on every dashboard and nothing in the system that could withdraw them. Correcting has no such exemption.

A form can keep its submissions open longer

Seven days suits a shift report. It does not suit a requisition that a site store raises and head office only settles at month end, once cash flow has been reviewed — by then the quantities head office wants to vary would already be locked.

So each form sets its own window. In the form builder, Days a submission can be corrected takes a whole number of days from 1 to 366; a form that has never set it keeps the standard 7.

• Only an administrator can change it — Level 6 or Admin clearance, or the account holder. Every other author of the form sees the field read-only, with a padlock saying why, and can go on editing everything else about the form. On a brand-new form the field unlocks once the form has been saved.
• Every change is recorded. Under the field, the builder lists each change — the old and new number of days, who made it and when — newest first. A change saved from a page that is out of date — opened before somebody else changed the window — is refused, and the builder asks you to reload the form. The number you typed stays in the field with a note, and your other changes to the form keep saving.
• It applies to submissions already filed. Lengthening a form's window reopens its older submissions that fall inside the new length; shortening it closes open ones at once.
• Deleting follows the same window. Deleting a submission needs Level 6 clearance and being the member who filed it, or Admin clearance — and even then it is allowed only while the submission could still be corrected. The account holder is not held to the window.
• Approval still closes a submission straight away, whatever the window. If head office varies quantities, it has to do so before signing the requisition off — or, on an approval chain, before its own stage approves.
• A figure the form published can be corrected or deleted from the item's readings for exactly as long as the submission itself can. That covers its value and its comment — not its date or period, which are the submission's. See Correcting a figure a form published.

Keep the window as short as the work allows

The window is also what stops somebody deleting a submission and filing a replacement in its place. A long window keeps that door open for longer, so give a form the time its process genuinely needs rather than the maximum.

Closed and raised-against submissions are locked

Two things lock a submission whatever its window says, and for everyone — the account holder and approvers included:

• It has been closed. Somebody decided the document is finished — typically a requisition accepted as short-delivered. Reopen it first if it genuinely needs to change.
• Documents have been raised against it. Another form draws its lines from this one — a Goods Delivered answering a Requisition. Changing or deleting the requisition would leave the delivery quoting figures that no longer exist, so the documents raised against it have to be withdrawn first.

The submission's own screen hides the correction action and says which of the two applies, and a figure the submission published cannot be changed from the item's readings either. The lock also stops a saved correction being filed.

The lock covers correcting and deleting a submission. Two deliberate acts on the whole form still apply to closed and raised-against submissions: retiring a field with its data discarded, and deleting the whole form.

Correcting by deleting

Sometimes the entry itself is wrong — filed on the wrong date, or a duplicate. That is a deletion rather than a correction, and it has its own consequences. See Deleting entries and templates.

A note on comments

A figure's comment travels with it. When you correct a value, check the comment beside it — a note about the old figure left in place will be read as a note about the new one.