Resolving an engagement: won, lost, or withdrawn

What resolving an engagement does

An engagement is one candidate you have invited into Diligence: a company you are evaluating for acquisition or, on a franchise HQ instance, a conversion candidate. While it is live, the candidate is deciding what to share and Verinode reads whatever they have granted, category by category. Resolving is how you close that out. It is a one-way, one-click action with three outcomes, Mark won, Mark lost, or Withdraw, and it does two things at once: it revokes the candidate's shared access immediately, and it locks the engagement into a retained record you can still open later as an audit artifact. This article covers the mechanics of that close. For what the workspace looks like while an engagement is still open, see Reading a Diligence engagement; for how a candidate grants and revokes their own data, see How diligence consent works.

Verinode does not decide which outcome an engagement gets. That call, and its timing, is yours. Verinode's role is to hold the data access honestly while the deal is live and to preserve an accurate record once you have made the call.

Where to find it

Open Diligence from the sidebar (route /diligence). The Diligence home shows an overview row (Active, Awaiting acceptance, Resolved), a row of engagements In progress, and a row of Resolved engagements underneath. Click into any engagement tile to open its detail workspace.

The resolve controls live at the bottom of that detail workspace, in a section labeled Resolve, but only while the engagement is still live. Under the heading, the workspace states plainly what resolving does:

Resolving closes the engagement and immediately ends the target's shared access. The record is kept as an audit artifact.

Below that line sit three buttons:

• Mark won
• Mark lost
• Withdraw

Once you click one, that section disappears and is replaced by a Resolved section reporting the new status and the retention date (see below). There is no undo button in the UI: the underlying status only moves from invited or active into a closed state, never back.

The three outcomes, and when to use each

All three buttons run the same underlying close: they differ only in the status label they leave behind and, if you use Diligence again down the line, in the read you'll get from your own history.

• Mark won. The candidate joins your network (a franchise HQ instance reads this as the candidate becoming a franchisee). Use this once the deal has actually closed, not once you have decided to move forward. The engagement moves to Closed: Won.
• Mark lost. The deal did not happen, for any reason on the seller's side (price, terms, the candidate chose another buyer, and so on). The engagement moves to Closed: Lost.
• Withdraw. You are pulling out, the candidate never fully engaged, or the engagement was opened by mistake. The engagement moves to Withdrawn.

There is a fourth closed status, Expired, but it is not a button. An engagement expires on its own if the invite link or the consent window times out before the candidate acts. You cannot trigger Expired manually.

What happens the moment you resolve

Resolving is not a soft close. Three things happen together, in one action:

1. Every live grant on the engagement is revoked immediately. Any data category the candidate had shared (Financials, Jobs & Claims, AP & Procurement, or Team & Compensation) goes dark at once, read-time, the next time anyone tries to view it. There is no grace period and no notice sent before the cutoff, resolving itself is the cutoff.
2. The engagement status changes to whichever button you clicked, and that status is what every list, tile, and label in Diligence now shows.
3. A retention window opens. The engagement is not deleted. It is kept, with everything that was on file up to that point, so you have a durable audit artifact of what was requested, what was shared, and how the deal was resolved.

None of this requires the candidate to do anything. The access-off and the status change both happen from your side, at the moment you click.

The retention window

Once resolved, the detail workspace's Resolved section reports the record's retention date in plain language, for example:

This engagement is closed: won. Records are retained until Oct 8, 2026.

The retention window runs from the moment you resolve. Verinode keeps the resolved engagement, its requested categories, whatever comparison data was in view before you closed it, and its audit trail, for that window, so you (or whoever on your team has access to Diligence) can still open the engagement and read exactly what happened: what was asked for, what came in, when it came in, and how the deal ended. This is what makes an engagement an audit artifact rather than a live workspace: the candidate's access is gone, but your own record of the deal is not.

If the date does not display, the engagement does not yet have a retention date set, which should not happen once a resolve action succeeds; treat that as worth a second look rather than assuming the record was silently dropped.

What the target sees after you resolve

The candidate's own account (their free account on the operator side, see How diligence consent works for how they got it and how they grant) reflects the same instant cutoff. Whatever categories they had shared with you stop being shared the moment you resolve, no matter which of the three outcomes you chose. They are not notified with a special message explaining why, from their side the access they had extended to this engagement simply ends.

Consistency across the app

A resolved engagement's status label follows it everywhere in Diligence: the tile on the Diligence home (grouped into the Resolved row, distinct from In progress), the Resolved count in the overview row at the top of the Diligence home, and the header of the engagement's own detail page all read the same humanized label (Closed: Won, Closed: Lost, Withdrawn, or Expired). There is no separate "reason" field to fill in beyond the outcome you chose, the three buttons are the entire disposition.

Frequently asked

Can I reopen a resolved engagement? No. Once resolved, the engagement stays in its closed status for the rest of the retention window. If the same company comes back into play later, you open a new engagement rather than reactivating the old one.

Does resolving delete anything? No. Resolving revokes live data access; it does not delete the engagement record, the categories that were requested, or the audit trail. Deletion, if it ever happens, would be separate from and later than the close itself, governed by the retention window.

What if the candidate never accepted the invite? An engagement sitting at Invited (they haven't accepted yet) can still be resolved, most often as Withdrawn, if you decide not to pursue it further. There is nothing to revoke in that case since no categories were ever granted, but the status still closes and the record is still retained.

Who can resolve an engagement? Only a group admin on the buyer side. The three buttons are not available to other roles, and the underlying action re-checks that the engagement belongs to your own group before it will touch it.