You decide the rules, I write them into the system
The rules of an automation are set by the company that uses it, not by whoever builds it. Muffin Suite's job is to turn those rules into something a computer can carry out, without quietly changing them because another rule would have been easier to build.
So if you tell me that above a certain amount the case stops and a person looks at it, the system stops above that amount. If tomorrow you tell me that threshold has to move, it moves. It's your decision, not the program's.
It sounds like a formality to put in the contract and be done with, and instead it's the thing that separates an automation that holds up from one that wastes your time.
A supplier who decides for you is guessing
People who build automations know programs, they don't know your trade, and that goes for me too. I know how to open a screen and fill it in the way a person would, but I don't know which supplier writes your amounts back to front, or which check you always run because one time it went badly.
If a supplier fills those gaps on his own, he's using the average of what he has seen elsewhere. The average isn't your company, it's a place that doesn't exist.
You see the result later, when the system does something that is reasonable in general and wrong for you, and nobody can say why it does it. Nobody ever decided that rule. It just settled there.
The questions I ask at the start are there to avoid exactly this. Which program you use, which steps the person goes through from beginning to end, what makes them stop, what makes them suspicious, and what happens when something doesn't add up.
The odd case is where the difference shows
The odd case always turns up. A document laid out differently from the rest, a number that doesn't match. At that moment only one thing counts, knowing why the system behaved the way it did.
If the rules are yours, the answer is right there. The system stopped because you had said to stop there. So you decide whether that rule is fine as it is or has to change, we change it, and today's odd case becomes a written rule for tomorrow.
If someone else put the rules in, the same situation turns into an investigation. You have to ask the supplier what he decided months earlier and hope he remembers, and meanwhile the work is standing still.
This is why an automation that stops when something doesn't add up is worth more than one that carries on. Stopping is one of your rules working. Carrying on is a mistake you're finding out about too late.
So the rules stay written down, readable and open to change, not shut inside the head of whoever built the system.
If you want to see how they end up in black and white, I go through that in what you need to have ready before we start, and the whole path of the work is in how it works