Methodology
How Northbench runs one workflow, well, in writing.
Northbench is the only automation retainer we know of that publicly commits to three things most agencies only gesture at — the monthly outcome report, a documented rollback procedure, and a human review pass on consequential outbound messages. The sections below spell each one out, with the same vocabulary your operations leads will see in the retainer brief.
01 · Monthly outcome report
One page. Sent the first of every month.
The report covers the one workflow we run for you. Same five sections, every month, for the life of the retainer. No vanity dashboards, no logs to scroll — a single page that names what happened and what we are changing next.
This page is the public, contract-grade spec for what the homepage Monthly Outcome Report panel summarizes. The numbers and the names below are the ones in the retainer brief.
Five sections, every month
- 01
Volume in
How many items ran through the workflow that month. Same definition every month — no renormalizing baselines after a quiet week.
- 02
Exception rate
The share of items that needed a human to step in — rekey a field, re-route, or restart a step. Trend matters more than the absolute number.
- 03
Median latency
Time from intake to final delivery for the typical case. We watch the median, not the best-case — the best case is what the demo showed.
- 04
Dollars touched
The dollar volume of transactions, invoices, or commitments the workflow handled on your behalf. Read alongside the volume figure, not instead of it.
- 05
Named incident root causes
One or two examples of an item that misfired that month, written up in a paragraph: what went wrong, what we changed, what the new behavior is.
02 · Documented rollback
If the workflow misbehaves, pause it and revert — in minutes, not days.
Every Northbench implementation ships with a written rollback procedure on day one — the kill switch, the revert steps, and the named human. If the workflow does the wrong thing, the close is short: pause, then revert. Then we write up what happened in the next monthly report.
Detection routes to a named human within minutes
A alert — sent by the workflow itself, or flagged by your team — hits the named Northbench operator on call. No silent on-call rotation; the same person signs the page the next morning.
Target: pager-to-human in under fifteen minutes.
Triage call within the hour
The same operator calls back, reads the report, and decides whether to pause, to leave running with a small fix, or to revert. The decision is written down, not just texted.
Target: live triage within sixty minutes of the alert.
Kill switch — one named toggle, flips in under a minute
A single named toggle in the workflow control panel flips the workflow to paused. No script to run, no SSH session required. Anyone on your team can flip it — you do not need a Northbench operator present.
Target: workflow paused, end-to-end, in well under one minute.
Revert to last known-good state
The implementation brief spells out the revert steps in plain English, named per integration — no Northbench operator needs to be on the line for your team to walk them. Every step is testable from a laptop.
Revert rehearsed quarterly against a throwaway test environment.
Incident summary lands in the next monthly report
The cause, the pause latency, the revert latency, and the change shipped to keep it from happening again are written up as a named root cause in the next monthly outcome report. You see it even if everything else is green.
Same one-page report, same first-of-the-month cadence.
What ships on day one
- Named support contact — the same person the audit brief names, on email northbench-elhqz7@polsia.app.
- A single, named kill switch — one toggle flips the workflow to paused. Your team can run it without Northbench on the call.
- Written revert steps for every integration — plain English, named per tool, testable from a laptop.
- Quarterly revert rehearsal against a throwaway environment — the steps have to work when it matters, not just on paper.
03 · Human review of consequential outbound
A person reads it before it leaves. Categories spelled out in writing.
The consequential category list is the heart of the retainer. It is not a marketing promise; it is the page your operations leads sign off on during the audit. Changing it is a retainer change order, not a silent override.
How a message is reviewed
- 01The AI draft is produced and sits in a review queue — no auto-send path exists for a consequential category.
- 02A Northbench operator reads the draft, edits if needed, and either approves or routes to the client's owner for sign-off on high-stakes items.
- 03A copy of the sent message, with the reviewer's name, lands in the monthly outcome report's audit-trail appendix.
The four consequential categories
Anything to a customer
A reply, a quote, a confirmation, a renewal reminder — any message that leaves your business under your name to someone who is paying you, or thinking about it.
Anything to a vendor
Work-order routing, partnership replies, statements of work — any message that obligates your business to a third party or spends money on your behalf.
Anything that moves money
Invoice creation, payment confirmations, refund acknowledgements, reconciliation entries — every step on the money path is a human-readable step before it commits.
Anything irreversible
Cancellations, deletions, opt-outs, scoping decisions that close a door. An automation cannot close a door without a human on the page first.
How the three promises work together
You can read what we did, stop what is broken, and trust what we sent.
Read
The monthly report names what ran and what changed.
Stop
The kill switch and the named contact pause a misfire fast.
Trust
The consequential category list keeps the consequential outbound on the page of a human before it leaves.
See it written up for your workflow
The audit brief is where your list ships — spelled out for the workflow you bring us.
Two weeks. A written brief on one chosen workflow in your vertical: what to automate, what to leave alone, and what it should cost monthly. $250 deposit, fully refundable against an implementation within sixty days.