Ship Log / Compliance
Automated Policy Holds and Spending Limits
Guardrails that run themselves, instead of rules people are asked to remember
Problem
Program rules — budgets, eligibility, monthly limits — lived in documents and in people's heads, then got enforced by whoever happened to notice.
Enforcement after the fact means the money is already gone; the only remaining lever is an awkward conversation.
Per-category exception rules are impractical to maintain: every new case adds another thing for staff to remember.
As the program grew, the compliance exposure grew with it — and the enforcement stayed manual.
Solution
Rules systematized into automated controls: budget shut-offs, sign-up and beta caps, eligibility checks that run at the moment of the request.
Account holds applied automatically when a policy condition is met, and released the same way.
Compliance checks placed in the integration layer rather than the interface, so every entry point inherits them.
Fewer, simpler rules by design — a policy that's cheap to enforce beats one that's precise on paper.
Result
Flagged reservations fell about 82% — roughly 152 a month down to 28.