Governance and commercial responsibilities¶

Adopting Zerohive involves decisions about who may act, which information may be used, what the organization has purchased and who handles an uncertain outcome. These responsibilities remain connected throughout the life of a workspace.

This guide brings those decisions together for business owners, administrators, finance teams and executives. The linked feature guides remain the detailed authority for product behavior and intended tasks.

Draft and availability: This is source-backed documentation under review. It does not establish a completed rollout, a contractual offer, a compliance certification or verified environment availability. Some frontend journeys and implementation details remain unfinished.

Keep responsibility, permission and eligibility separate¶

Three questions recur throughout the platform:

A person can be responsible for a process without being allowed to perform every operation in it. Buying an entitlement does not grant all members every permission. A permission can be present while a required provider or user interface is unavailable.

Read membership and access and product access. Workspace administrators and platform staff have different powers; neither title implies unrestricted access to all customer information.

Establish organization and decision authority¶

Identify the workspace that owns the information and the process. Confirm who administers membership, maintains people and reporting structure, and owns the business rules.

Organization structure, People and governance authority represent different responsibilities. Branches describe physical-location groupings. Organization-head designations can feed approval authority. Approval bodies distinguish eligible voters, quorum, direct signers and delegates.

A saved configuration is not a completed business decision. Creating an approval body does not cast a vote; enrolling a signature does not authorize every document; changing a designation does not prove that pending work already reflects it.

Use workflow execution to understand the actual task and decision. Keep the process owner involved when changing authority that affects unfinished work.

Set information boundaries¶

Decide what information belongs in the process, who owns it and which participants may receive it. Use the relevant source product's access and lifecycle rules.

Records explains classification, filing and retention. Document sessions explain authorized upload, viewing and signing. Upload completion, registration as a record, successful viewing and final signing are separate outcomes.

For an enterprise network, identify the relationship between workspaces and any commercial arrangement separately from access to a specific item. Shared work retains sending, receiving, participation and document boundaries. A network link does not merge all information or authorize every exchange.

Confirm actual hosting requirements through the appropriate commercial and operational process. The region text entered during workspace creation does not select the backend provisioning region. A country or branch label is not proof of data location.

Understand plans, seats and capacity¶

A plan describes commercial eligibility and allowances. A subscription records the workspace's ongoing commercial arrangement. Licensed seats, assigned access and people currently signed in are different quantities.

Current access also depends on the effective plan and its exact coverage dates. A pending plan change, a completed payment and the plan actually in effect can describe different stages. Trial, paid-renewal grace and free-plan expiry have different rules; a saved payment method is not proof that renewal succeeded. Use subscription coverage and plan changes to check the actual arrangement before promising continued access.

Use usage and capacity before making a change:

• Review the plan's permitted capacity and the subscription's purchased quantity.
• Distinguish base storage allowance from purchased additions and measured consumption.
• Check the measurement's period, observation time and collection limits.
• Investigate absent or unexpected measurements before interpreting them as zero use or unlimited capacity.
• Review how a proposed reduction affects current use and future work.

The current usage response has limitations in distinguishing an absent storage measurement from a measured zero. A capacity display should therefore be considered with the actual commercial terms and supporting evidence.

Products can have additional access assignments or commercial items. A quantity add-on is not automatically a number of employee seats. The Billing explanation distinguishes these purchase types.

Review the actual commercial change¶

Use the current offered plan or authorized agreement and the saved summary for the requested change. Check its currency, quantity, amount due now, recurring commitment, tax where applicable and effective time.

Sample design prices, fallback plan labels and a displayed plan name do not establish an offer. A trial follows the selected plan's current rules; this guide does not promise a universal trial period or free renewal. Quote-only arrangements have their own commercial process.

A commercial change can pass through several distinct stages:

1. The request is recorded.
2. A payment step is prepared when needed.
3. Payment is verified.
4. The change is applied to the workspace, immediately or at its recorded future effective time.
5. The relevant subscription, entitlement or capacity reflects the result.

Not every request needs every stage. A scheduled reduction is a future commitment, while a saved payment link is only preparation. A charge and a changed allowance need their own evidence.

When the outcome is uncertain, retain the original request and payment references. Check the original workflow and resulting workspace state before starting another purchase. A payment-provider receipt or an acknowledged callback does not alone prove application. Detailed recovery belongs in the Billing guide.

Agree who can resolve billing when product access is unavailable. An eligible current workspace administrator can have billing recovery access without a product seat or current paid-product coverage; that access does not itself restore members' work. A finance job title alone does not grant the administrator role. Billing notices can be delayed, skipped or worded less precisely than the underlying purchase, so the original payment and current applied state remain the basis for a decision.

Treat HiveAI spending and governance as related controls¶

HiveAI chargeable work uses prepaid credit. Budgets constrain spending for their defined scopes and periods. A budget does not add credit, and funding does not override a budget, permission or governance restriction.

The credit and budget guide distinguishes available, held, settled and expired credit. A held amount is not the same as a final charge. An uncertain answer or action can require accounting reconciliation as well as business recovery. Do not add overlapping user, team and department usage as though it represented different work.

For governed assistance, establish:

• The approved business purpose and information sources.
• The permitted users and the human responsible for reviewing important results.
• The approved provider and model, together with actual environment readiness.
• The spending authority, relevant credit and budget limits.
• The knowledge-content owner and publication decision.
• The route for incident investigation, recovery and communication.

These responsibilities are explained in HiveAI governance, providers and models, workspace knowledge and governed actions.

A governance record is a product control, not an independent compliance certificate. A cited answer still needs appropriate review. Approving an action does not prove the source product completed it. Closing an incident does not reverse a charge or restore deleted information.

Non-private HiveAI capabilities are enabled by default in the reviewed backend, subject to commercial and security controls. This does not prove a working frontend or provisioned provider. Private Cloud remains disabled.

Interpret oversight without overstating it¶

Operational and business evidence answer different questions. A healthy service check does not prove every customer action worked. A low incident count does not prove complete collection or safe use. Audit records cover the actions and details actually retained.

Use platform oversight to understand service, audit and lifecycle evidence. Internal engineering and operational procedures remain in private GitHub documentation for their authorized readers.

For workforce insight, review HiveOrbit measures and source coverage. A contribution measure, recognition point balance and award have distinct meanings. Missing or incomplete evidence must be resolved before making claims that require complete coverage.

Plan for lifecycle changes and recovery¶

Account deactivation, workspace suspension, subscription changes, export and deletion affect different things. They should not be treated as interchangeable ways to stop work.

Account lifecycle concerns a person. Workspace lifecycle concerns the organization's access and status. Data-lifecycle oversight describes export/deletion coordination and its current service, storage and completion limits.

A submitted export or deletion request can still have unfinished participants or artifacts. A completed participant does not prove universal erasure or inclusion of every external provider. Suspension does not itself establish deletion. Billing recovery can restore a billing suspension but does not lift an administrator or support pause. Administrator restoration also depends on the recorded pause's permitted recovery route. Assign the cause to the correct owner instead of treating another payment as a universal way to regain access.

Assign an owner for uncertain results and preserve the relevant workspace, item, original action reference, approximate time and visible error. Share only the information needed for investigation through the authorized support route. Business recovery, access restoration and accounting follow-up may require different owners.

Bring the decisions into the adoption plan¶

The adoption guide provides a compact record for scope, ownership, prerequisites, evidence and recovery. Use it to make unresolved constraints visible before expanding a process.

Keep actual terms in the commercial record, detailed behavior in the canonical feature guide and observed rollout results in the organization's adoption evidence. This guide does not replace any of those records.