Settlement period

A settlement period is the time a billing system waits after the latest event before making a provisional result final. It exists because agent outcomes are not final when first observed. A resolved ticket can be reopened. A booked meeting can be cancelled. A signed document can be voided. The settlement period absorbs those reversals before anything reaches an invoice.

How it works

Every accepted event resets the settlement timer. An outcome cannot confirm or fail while signals are still arriving. When the timer finally expires, the outcome finalizes based on whether the billable condition holds at that moment:

• Condition met: the outcome confirms and becomes a charge.
• Condition not met: the outcome is missed and nothing is billed.

A reopening event inside the window flips the condition, resets the timer and prevents the charge. That is the mechanism behind the one-sentence outcome specification: we charge when something happens and remains true for the settlement period.

Typical values

In witn the settlement period defaults to 72 hours and is set per agent contract, from 1 second up to 180 days. Longer windows fit outcomes with long reversal horizons, like a code change that must hold in production or an incident that must not recur.

The equivalent concept in per-resolution support contracts is the reopen window, part of the fine print that moves effective prices more than headline rates do.

Related

• Outcome lifecycle in the docs
• Outcome-based pricing
• Resolution layer