Deal State
Every deal has a state -- Draft, Open, Paused, Closed, or Cancelled -- that summarizes where it is in its lifecycle. Today it is informational. Soon it will drive real platform behavior, so it must be kept accurate now.
Work in progress. Deal State is currently informational only. Nothing on the platform changes behavior based on it yet -- investors can still invest, publishing still controls visibility, and payments still flow the same way. We are rolling out the state model first so we can trust the data before we start building on top of it. Treat it as the source of truth starting now, because the features that will depend on it are coming soon.
Why we have Deal State
Today, "where is this deal?" has to be reconstructed from a handful of unrelated signals -- is it published, does it have an SPV, what stage is that SPV in, has the deadline passed, and so on. That makes it hard to answer simple questions like "is this deal actively raising?" or "has this deal wrapped up?" at a glance.
Deal State collapses all of that into a single label per deal, kept in sync automatically. Over time, more and more of the product (investor-facing lists, reporting, GTM triggers, automations) will read this single label instead of rebuilding it from scratch.
The Five States
Draft
The deal has been created but has never been published.
- Today: informational. The deal is invisible to investors because it has not been published yet.
- Future: will be the explicit "not ready yet" state. Readiness checks, content warnings, and pre-launch automations will key off this.
Open
The deal is live and at least one of its SPVs is still accepting investments.
- Today: informational. Investors see the deal if it is published; the SPV's own stage is what actually controls whether money can be committed.
- Future: will be the single flag for "actively raising." Deal listings, investor banners, weekly digests, and GTM workflows will all read this directly.
Paused
The deal has been temporarily taken off the platform.
- Today: set automatically whenever a deal is unpublished. Informational.
- Future: will represent a soft pause -- the deal keeps its history and its SPVs, but investors can't see it and most automations are suppressed. Re-publishing brings it back.
Closed
The deal has wrapped up. Every SPV on the deal has finished raising (all Closed, possibly with some Cancelled alongside).
- Today: informational. The deal may still be published; the SPV's own stage is what actually prevents new investments.
- Future: will drive "past deals" sections, disable investment flows, and trigger post-raise reporting.
Cancelled
The deal has been abandoned. Every SPV on the deal is Cancelled.
- Today: informational.
- Future: will permanently remove the deal from investor views and surface it only in admin and historical reporting.
How Deal State Changes Automatically
Admins don't normally need to change Deal State by hand. It is kept in sync by two triggers:
1. Publishing and unpublishing the deal
| Admin action | Effect on Deal State |
|---|---|
| Publish the deal (first time) | Draft -> re-derived from the deal's SPVs |
| Publish the deal (after a pause) | Paused -> re-derived from the deal's SPVs |
| Unpublish the deal | Any state -> Paused |
Publishing means "bring this deal to life now." Unpublishing always moves the deal to Paused, even if the SPV is already Closed or Cancelled -- the platform treats "hidden from investors" as the stronger signal.
2. SPV stage changes
Whenever an SPV attached to a published deal moves stage (opened, closed, cancelled, emergency-opened), the deal's state is automatically re-derived from the full set of SPVs on that deal:
| SPV stages on the deal | Deal becomes |
|---|---|
| Any SPV is still Draft or Pending | Open |
| All SPVs are Closed (or a mix of Closed and Cancelled) | Closed |
| All SPVs are Cancelled | Cancelled |
Unpublished deals are frozen. If a deal is Paused and an admin cancels its SPV, the deal stays Paused. This protects admin intent -- unpublishing is a deliberate hide, and unrelated SPV churn shouldn't undo it. The deal will re-derive from its SPVs the next time it is published.
Manually Changing Deal State
The deal's show page has a Change State button (in the Lifecycle group) that lets an admin force the deal to Open, Paused, Closed, or Cancelled.
A manual change is not sticky. The next time the deal is published, unpublished, or an SPV changes stage, Deal State will re-derive automatically and can overwrite whatever you set. Use the manual control to correct a state that is wrong right now, not to express long-term intent.
Every manual change is written to the audit trail with the previous state, the new state, and the admin who made the change. Automatic changes are logged too, and clearly labelled as automatic (with the reason: publish, unpublish, or SPV stage change), so you can always tell at a glance whether a state came from an admin or from the system.
Where Deal State Appears in the Admin
- Deals index: a colored "Deal State" column sits next to "SPV Status" for at-a-glance triage.
- Deal show page: a "Deal State" row appears right under the Published / Unpublished row in the main panel.
- Filters: the Deals index can be filtered by Deal State.
- Audit trail: every transition -- manual or automatic -- is recorded on the deal's audit entries.
Why You Should Maintain It Today
Nothing visible breaks today if Deal State is wrong. But stale state poisons the data we're about to build on. The first time we turn on a feature that reads Deal State (investor filters, reporting, GTM triggers, post-raise automations), every deal that was left in the wrong state will behave incorrectly on day one. Treat it as if it were already wired up.
If you spot a deal whose state looks wrong, use Change State to correct it and file a bug so we can fix the underlying rule -- manual overrides are a safety valve, not a long-term answer.
Last updated Apr 22, 2026
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