--- title: "Decision receipt" summary: "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." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # 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. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Decisions and evidence ## How to read this 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](https://entitybind.com/glossary#decisions). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## 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. ## 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 audit pack](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack): The fixtures, the verdict logs and the replay path: what an evaluator needs to re-run a published rate for themselves. - [The API reference](https://entitybind.com/api): The REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field. - [How it works](https://entitybind.com/how-it-works): The seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next. 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. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [KYC and onboarding](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/kyc-and-onboarding) (Use case): Counterparty identity with a receipt that survives seven years. - [KYB data requirements](https://entitybind.com/guides/kyb-data-requirements) (Guide): What a know-your-business onboarding flow actually needs, field by field, and which step is identity resolution. Explicitly not a screening, scoring or eligibility tool. ## 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. - [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor) - [Abstention](https://entitybind.com/glossary/abstention) - [Review queue](https://entitybind.com/glossary/review-queue) - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance) - [Citation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/citation) - [Idempotency](https://entitybind.com/glossary/idempotency) - [Replay](https://entitybind.com/glossary/replay) - [Content fingerprint](https://entitybind.com/glossary/content-fingerprint) Previous, alphabetically: [D-U-N-S number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/duns) · Next, alphabetically: [Deduplication](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deduplication) ## 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. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.