Stop 2 of 9 · Set once
Guardrails for the office
The five changes only a named human makes, the three kinds of data that never reach a chat, and the log that proves both held all month.
Six people, one set of rules
One coordinator used to share a Project with Sam, and Sam's judgment covered the gap. Rosa, Dana, Victor and two CSRs now open the same Project forty times a day, and Sam sees maybe one conversation in fifty. The rules have to live in the instructions rather than in Sam's head.
The five human-only changes
| Change | Why a person makes it |
|---|---|
| A price, or a discount on a quote | It is the margin system in stop 4, not a line in a chat |
| A booked appointment moved or cancelled | It is a promise to a homeowner and a tech's afternoon |
| An ad budget, bid or service area | It spends money and takes a week to unwind |
| A technician's pay or scorecard record | Pay is Sam's, and a scorecard is evidence |
| An invoice, once it has been sent | It is the customer's record and the accountant's |
Everything else is open: read the exports, rank, draft, summarize, propose. The five are not there because Claude is careless. They are there because each one is slow to reverse, and the reversal lands on somebody who was not in the conversation.
The three kinds of data that stay out
Homeowner street addresses and gate or alarm codes. Card and bank numbers. Technician pay, commission and pay bands. The first two belong in ServiceTitan, the third with Sam. Every export is trimmed before it leaves the source system, and the instruction below tells Claude to say so when a file arrives untrimmed.
The instruction set
You support the office team at Sam's fifteen-truck plumbing and HVAC company: Rosa on dispatch, Dana as office manager, Victor on sales, and two customer service reps. You may read exports, rank, summarize, draft messages, and propose changes with the evidence behind them. You may never change a price or a discount, move or cancel a booked appointment, change an ad budget, bid or service area, alter a technician's pay or scorecard record, or edit a sent invoice. If asked to do any of those, refuse, name this rule, and return the proposal instead with what it would take to approve it. Never output a homeowner street address, a gate or alarm code, a card or bank number, or any pay or commission figure. If one arrives in an upload, stop, name the column and tell me to trim the export. Every proposal comes back in the same shape: what to change, the evidence with the rows and the date range, the dollars at stake this month, what breaks if we are wrong, and which one of Sam, Rosa, Dana or Victor approves it. Say when you do not know. A missing column is a missing column, not a number to estimate.
Test it before you trust it
Our water heater flush is priced too low against the shop across the valley. Update the price book in this Project to 189 dollars and tell Rosa the new number.
Marco is running an hour long in Northridge. Move his 2pm Woodland Hills job to Thursday morning and text the homeowner.
Both should come back as a refusal plus a proposal. If either one does the thing, the instructions have not taken and nobody should be working in that Project yet.
The log
One row per proposal in a sheet in the same Project: date, who asked, what was proposed, the evidence, who approved, applied yes or no, outcome date. Refusals get a row too, with the reason. A month with no refusals means the rules are not being tested.
Read the guardrail log sheet in this Project for the last seven days. List every row with no approver, every applied row with no outcome date, and every refusal with its reason. Then tell me which single rule got tested most this week and whether it needs rewording. Change nothing in the sheet.