Glossary · Decisions and evidence

Decision receipt

A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer.
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The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under decisions and evidence.

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the full definition

What decision receipt means

A decision receipt is the stored artefact that lets somebody months later ask why these two records were merged, what evidence existed at the time, which thresholds were in force, and which model and prompt version produced the verdict. A similarity score answers none of that. Without a receipt a resolution is an assertion, and an assertion cannot be audited, contested or safely reversed.

The properties that make a receipt worth having are that it is minted at decision time rather than reconstructed, that it is addressable by an id returned in the response, that it is queryable as a population rather than one at a time, and that it records the policy in force rather than only the outcome. The last one is what makes remediation possible: 'show me every decision taken under the threshold we have since raised' is a question that can only be answered if each decision stored the threshold it was judged under.

A receipt is also the precondition for reversibility. A merge that can be explained is a merge that can be unwound, and one that cannot be explained can only be unwound by guessing which facts came from which side.

Entity Bind mints a receipt for every resolution and returns its decision id in the response. The receipt carries the evidence for its own decision — the scored feature vector where the scorer decided, the named identifier rule where an identifier decided, the cited sources where research decided — and can be redeemed at a URL or replayed. Receipts are also readable as a population, filtered by pipeline version, threshold and decision window.

in the running product

Where this shows up in Entity Bind

Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.

The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.

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see also

The terms next to this one

Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.

Provenance

Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole.

Citation

A citation is a resolvable pointer to the specific source document or record that supports a claim, as distinct from a source name, which is only an attribution.

Replay

Replay is re-serving a previous decision for byte-identical content rather than recomputing it, which makes repeated submissions free and deterministic — provided the replayed decision is still one the system would stand behind.

Review queue

A review queue is where records the system refused to decide are held for a human, and the quality of a resolver is largely determined by how small, how well-evidenced and how accountable that queue is.

Over-merge

An over-merge is a cluster containing records from more than one real entity — the failure that turns two customers, two suppliers or two counterparties into one.

Idempotency

An operation is idempotent when performing it repeatedly has the same effect as performing it once, which is what makes a retry after a timeout safe rather than duplicating work.

Decisions and evidence

The other 8 terms on this shelf

What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards.

evidence basis

Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.

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