Security and Controls
Guardrails, not compliance theater. Every workflow ships with human approvals, audit logs, permission mirroring, and a kill switch. You stay in control.
Why Guardrails Exist
Most automation tools let you build whatever you want with no safety net. Workflows send emails without approval. They process payments without caps. They run in production with no audit trail. When something goes wrong, you find out from a customer complaint.
DecarbDesk takes the opposite approach. Every workflow ships with the same controls your team already follows: approval gates, audit logs, hard caps, and a kill switch. Not because compliance requires it. Because your business requires it.
Human Approval Gates
Every high-value or sensitive action requires explicit human approval before executing. No workflow sends a payment, changes a record, or contacts a customer without someone on your team saying "yes" first.
Approvals happen in Slack. Your team reviews the proposed action, sees the data involved, and confirms before the workflow proceeds. If nobody approves within your configured window, the action pauses and you get an alert.
Audit Logs
Every action taken by every workflow is logged with timestamp, input, output, and decision. You can review the complete history of any workflow at any time.
Logs are structured and searchable. If an invoice was processed last Tuesday, you can pull up exactly what the workflow did, what data it read, what it wrote, and who approved it. Full traceability from trigger to completion.
Permission Mirroring
Workflows never get more access than the human they replace. If your AP clerk can only approve invoices under $5,000, the workflow follows the same rule.
During setup, we map your existing permission structure and replicate it exactly. Role limits, dollar thresholds, and department boundaries are all enforced automatically. The workflow operates within the same constraints your team already follows.
Data Handling
Data stays in your existing tools: QuickBooks, Gmail, Sheets. Workflows read and write through authorized API connections. No data is stored on our infrastructure beyond what is needed for processing.
API credentials are encrypted at rest and in transit. Connections use OAuth where available, and we follow the principle of least privilege: each workflow only gets access to the specific data it needs, nothing more.
Kill Switch
Any workflow can be paused or stopped instantly. One click in Slack or one call to us. There is no waiting period, no queue, no "are you sure" confirmation chain.
Workflows fail safe. If something unexpected happens, they pause and alert you instead of continuing. An unrecognized vendor, an amount outside normal range, a missing field: the workflow stops and asks for help rather than guessing.
No Lock-In
We build on open standards and open-source infrastructure: SMTP for email, HTTP for APIs, PostgreSQL for data, Docker for deployment, Git for version control. Nothing proprietary sits between your tools and the workflow logic.
Your data stays in your tools at all times. If you cancel, there is nothing to export, nothing to migrate, and nothing held hostage. We use your QuickBooks, your Gmail, your Sheets. You walk away with everything exactly where it was.
Questions about security?
Book a 15-minute fit call. We will walk through our controls, answer your questions, and show you how guardrails work in practice.