FLOW-0003 — Commitments That Cannot Be Silently Edited

A purchase order is a promise to an outside party, and promises that can be quietly edited are worthless — to the supplier, to the auditor, and to the next person who reads the record. This scenario shows the discipline around that promise: total freedom while composing, a hard freeze at the moment of commitment, precise refusals for everything disallowed after it, and closure only by deliberate acts.

Use cases traversed

This flow is a path across use cases, in order. Identifiers are the immutable prefix form defined in the naming convention; a flow is not a level-4 scenario.

Domains crossed: Procurement.

Step	Use case	What happens
1	PRO::PO::0001	An order is composed as a draft
2	PRO::PO::0003	The draft is edited freely
3	PRO::PO::0004	Submit freezes the commitment
4	PRO::PO::0005	Post-submission tracking begins
5	PRO::PO::0007	The order is closed or cancelled by a deliberate act

The business value: clean supplier communication and internal accountability — the order the vendor received is provably the order the record shows, forever.

Actors and domains

• David Dealsworth — procurement. Composes, commits, and closes.
• Vera Vendorson — the external supplier the commitment goes to.

The diagram conventions — the domain colors, the dependency ordering, and the arrow meanings — are those of the scenario catalog.

The scenario at domain level

The submission floor is real

Submit is where composition becomes commitment, and the floor under it is checked right there: at least one line; a supplier linked to a vendor (a name alone can carry a draft, never a submission) and that vendor not retired — re-checked at this moment even though the draft’s pin was taken earlier; and every serviced demand item ready to start. Each failure returns its own precise reason, and the draft keeps its content — fix the cause and resubmit.

What freezes — and what stays open

The freeze covers everything that defines the promise: the order’s structure (its lines), its supplier, its header details, and its assignee, each held on the version pinned at submission. What stays open is everything that happens to the promise: the supplier’s answers, the receipts accruing against the lines, and notes. Two labels the user sees — Confirmed and Receiving — are computed views over Submitted, not stored states; nothing transitions to reach them.

Endings are deliberate

The two ways out are as disciplined as the freeze. Cancel exists only while the order is a draft — canceling a submitted order would retract a commitment to an outside party, so it is deliberately not a casually available action — and canceling a draft returns every attached demand item to the queue untouched (walked in the pull-replenishment round trip). Close requires every line closed first, and a line with quantity still outstanding closes short only by an explicit act — never automatically, never by timeout.

Where the behavior is specified

• Orders — the order and line machines, the operations table with each action’s gate, and the freeze guarantees.
• Business Affiliate — the vendor pin, the linked-vendor requirement, and the retirement re-check.
• Demand — the demand items an order services and their readiness at Submit.