Approvals Reset on Upload — V4 vs V5 / Frozen Workflow Triage

What This Skill Debugs

Support and customers often interpret approval steps restarting after a document upload as a platform bug tied to workspace “reset approvals on upload” settings. In production, a frequent explanation is:

1. The contract still runs on Approvals V4 (pinned to a historical workflow snapshot), while Workflow Manager shows the current V5 configuration — so settings and IDs will not match what the contract actually uses.
2. On V4 contracts, the upload flow can explicitly ask the user which approvals to re-collect (collect_approvals). If the user selects approvals in that UI, the system will reset/recollect those steps — this is working as designed for V4, not the same rules as V5 (where workflow configuration governs behavior).

A second-order confusion: the activity log may show approval events in an order that does not match the true sequence. Engineering has called this an activity-log bug (not fixed as of the Noon incident). Do not use the activity log alone to disprove upload-time recollection when logs/FullStory show collect_approvals.

When to Use / Not Use

Use this skill when: