Canceling or abandoning a plan

What canceling a plan does

Not every plan you start gets finished, and Verinode does not pretend otherwise. Circumstances change, a carrier moves first, or you decide to go a different way before the last step is checked off. The cancel-plan dialog is how you close that plan out honestly: it stops the plan without recording it as a completed win, and without asking you to fill in the full close-out post-mortem (no usefulness rating, no "what worked / what didn't" fields). One reason, an optional note, confirm.

This is deliberately the lighter of Verinode's two ways to close a decision. The full close-out flow (star rating, actual dollar impact, what worked and what didn't) is for acting on decisions you actually finished. Canceling is for the ones you didn't, and it says so plainly rather than dressing up an abandoned plan as a success.

Where to find it

The dialog opens from two places, both reached from Decisions in the sidebar:

• A single decision workspace, at /decisions/[id]. Open any decision with a live action plan and look at the row of controls above the step list, alongside Save to SOP and Add to calendar (when those apply). Click Cancel plan. It only appears on a plan that is still live: once a plan is resolved, one way or another, the button is gone because there is nothing left to cancel.
• Action Plans, at /actions. This is the sidebar entry labeled Action Plans, the Gantt-style view of every decision you've kicked off, its subtitle reading "Every decision you've kicked off, owners, due dates, progress. The work in flight." Above the timeline, switch into select mode (the same control that lets you check off multiple plans) to pick several plans at once. A sticky bar appears at the bottom of the screen reading how many are selected ("3 selected," or "No plans selected" if you haven't checked any) with a Done button to exit selection and a Cancel plan (or Cancel 3 plans, pluralized to the count) button that opens the same dialog for the whole batch.

Either path lands on the identical dialog: pick a reason, add a note if you want, confirm. The only difference is whether it is acting on one signal ID or several.

What the dialog shows

Title. "Cancel this plan?" for a single plan, or "Cancel N plans?" when you've selected more than one from Action Plans.

The explainer line. Right under the title, the dialog states exactly what is about to happen:

• Single plan: "This closes out as not completed. It moves to Resolved and leaves your active plans. You can start a fresh plan anytime."
• Multiple plans: "These close out as not completed. They move to Resolved and leave your active plans. You can start fresh plans anytime."

That is the whole contract. Read it before confirming: canceling is a status change, not an erase, and it doesn't stop you from spinning up a new plan on the same decision later if it becomes relevant again.

Why are you canceling? (required). Three reason options, each a clickable row with a copper-highlighted radio dot when selected:

• No longer relevant. "Circumstances changed. This plan is moot."
• Changed approach. "Going a different way. Dropping this plan."
• Abandoned. "Stepping away from this for now."

You must pick one before you can confirm. Under the hood these three map to two outcome categories Verinode tracks: "No longer relevant" is recorded as its own reason, while "Changed approach" and "Abandoned" both land in the same underlying "abandoned" bucket, since both describe a plan the operator stopped working on rather than one that stopped making sense. The distinction you pick still gets preserved on the plan's own record for your own audit trail, and either way the plan counts as not-successful in Verinode's learning loop (more on that below).

Note (optional). A short free-text box, placeholder "Anything worth remembering about why." Nothing is required here. Whatever you type is stored on the plan's outcome record, it never becomes part of the decision's public detail unless you choose to look for it, and it isn't rolled into any cross-operator benchmark or shared with anyone.

Error state. If something goes wrong, an inline message appears below the note field in a soft red panel. Two ways to see one:

• The cancel actually failed (a database or permission error), the message surfaces the underlying reason.
• Nothing ended up getting canceled, most often because everything you had selected was already resolved by the time you confirmed. In that case the message reads "Nothing to cancel," or names the specific reason (for example, an already-closed plan) if Verinode has one.

Footer buttons. Keep plan (or Keep plans) closes the dialog with no changes. Cancel plan (or Cancel N plans, matching the selection count) is the destructive confirm button, styled in Verinode's warning red, and disabled until you've picked a reason. While the cancel is in flight it shows a loading state and the dialog cannot be dismissed by clicking outside it or pressing Escape, so a slow save can't be abandoned halfway.

What happens after you confirm

Canceling touches four things behind the scenes, and it is worth knowing what each one means for your record:

1. The decision itself moves to Resolved. Its status flips from active to resolved, a resolved timestamp is stamped, and it drops out of your active decision list and out of the Action Plans timeline. It is not gone: it is in your history like any other closed decision, just tagged as not completed rather than completed.
2. A closed-decision record is written with no rating. This is the same underlying record type the full close-out flow uses, but the star rating field is deliberately left blank. A blank rating here means "the operator didn't judge this plan's usefulness," not "the operator rated it zero." Verinode's aggregate usefulness scores across your account are built only from decisions you actually rated, so a canceled plan never drags that average down. It still counts, honestly, toward how often plans in this area get finished versus dropped, because that pattern (not just the ratings) is part of what helps IQ recommend better next time.
3. The plan's own progress is preserved, not erased. However many steps you'd completed before canceling stay on the record exactly as they were, alongside the reason and note you gave. Canceling doesn't retroactively undo work you'd already done. Because a canceled plan is neither a completed success nor a measured failure, it never triggers the "This plan didn't move the metric" banner and its "Regenerate plan with IQ" prompt, that banner is reserved for plans that ran to completion and then failed to move the number they were meant to move. Canceling early sidesteps that judgment entirely: you stopped it, Verinode isn't grading it.
4. You get an in-app confirmation. A notification reads "Plan canceled: [decision title]" with the body "Closed out without completing. You can start a fresh plan anytime," linking back to the decision.

Every part of this happens per plan, independently. If you cancel a batch of several plans from Action Plans and one of them hits an error partway through, say it was already resolved a moment earlier by another action, the rest of the batch still goes through. The dialog's error state (or a lower "canceled" count than you expected) is where you'd notice.

Empty and edge states

• No live plan to cancel. The Cancel plan button on a decision workspace only renders when the plan has no resolved timestamp yet. Once a plan is already resolved (canceled, completed, or closed some other way), the button disappears entirely rather than showing a disabled state.
• Nothing selected in Action Plans. In select mode, the sticky bottom bar reads "No plans selected" and its Cancel plan button is grayed out until you check at least one row.
• Everything you picked was already closed. If you confirm on a selection where every plan turns out to already be resolved (a race with another update, for instance), the dialog shows "Nothing to cancel" instead of a false success, and nothing in your decision list changes.
• A note left blank. Perfectly fine. The note is optional; only the reason is required.

Best-practice example

Say IQ surfaced a decision to renegotiate a slow-paying carrier's terms, you started the plan, and got two of five steps done before that carrier called and fixed the payment cadence on their own. The plan is now moot. Open the decision at /decisions/[id], click Cancel plan, pick No longer relevant (the carrier's own move made this plan unnecessary, it isn't that you gave up on it), and add a note: "Carrier fixed pay cadence unprompted, no longer an issue." Confirm. The decision moves to Resolved, your two completed steps stay on the record, and nothing about this shows up as a rated failure anywhere in your account. If the same pattern crops up again with a different carrier, you can act on that decision fresh, with no baggage from this one.

Related reading

• Acting on decisions: the full close-out flow for plans you finish, including the usefulness rating and dollar-impact fields this lighter cancel flow skips.
• The decision workspace: what a decision's detail page shows beyond the plan itself.
• The Feed: how canceled decisions relate to what surfaces next.