What are decisions and track records?

A decision is a record of what your business settled and why, kept on the thing it affects. An outcome is what you expected to happen, measured later so you find out whether it did.

Find them under Decisions in the sidebar.

Why would you record a decision?

Because in six months nobody remembers why, and the reasoning is worth more than the choice.

Fairgreen Golf Co. moved a fabric from Portside Mills to Kaimen Knitwear last spring. Everyone involved knew why at the time: a lead-time problem, and a price that had moved twice.

A year later, with two of those people gone, the record showed a supplier change and nothing else. The next buyer had to rediscover the reasoning from scratch, and nearly moved it back.

A decision recorded at the time is one minute. Reconstructing it later is a week and a wrong answer.

What does a decision hold?

What was decided, why, what we didn't do, and when this was decided.

That third field is the one nobody else asks for and the one that pays. Recording the option you rejected is what stops the same debate happening every year.

Decisions are recorded on the record they affect, so they stay with it: a purchase order, a supplier, a wholesale account or order, or a custom record. See How to record a decision.

What is an outcome?

A commitment about what the decision should produce, attached to it and measured when the time comes.

That turns a decision log into a track record: not just what you decided, but how often your decisions worked out. See How to commit to an outcome and have it measured.

The track record can be grouped by supplier, by person or by team, which answers a question most businesses cannot answer at all.

What will it never claim?

That the decision caused the outcome.

Tideswell reports what was decided and what was measured side by side and deliberately does not join them. Business is noisy, and a tool that told you your call worked because a number went up would be lying to you.

The judgement stays yours. What Tideswell provides is the pair of facts you would otherwise not have.

Who can use it?

The Decisions module has to be on, and you need store access. Recording one needs the right to record decisions on the record you are recording against.

Attaching an outcome to a decision is limited to the person who wrote the decision.

Read this section in order

How to record a decision is the habit worth forming. How to commit to an outcome and have it measured is the part that makes it measurable, and How to read the decision log and check a track record is where you read it all back.