Transaction Templates, Gates and Approvals for Team Leads/TCs

Requires Ace Trove and Back Office's Transactions toggle left on (default on).

What you'll have when you're done

• A checklist template with phases and a gate on each one that actually stops (or attests, or just advises) a deal from moving forward with work outstanding.
• An approval requirement on the items that genuinely need a second set of eyes — a signed disclosure, a broker sign-off — without turning every item into a review bottleneck.
• A board across every open deal your team is working, with overdue items, missing key parties, and pending approvals waiting on you.
• An audit trail of every attestation, approval, and phase move, permanent and exportable.

Your first win, in about 10 minutes

1. Open Back Office → Transactions in the Ace Trove group of the admin sidebar.
2. Open Templates. Ace ships two research-backed starting templates (buyer-side, listing-side) built lazily the first time you read them — edit or delete them freely.
3. Pick a template and open Phases. Each phase can carry a gate: leave it advisory for a heads-up, set it attested to require a logged acknowledgment, or set it blocking to genuinely require the outstanding items to clear first.
4. If you set a gate to blocking, you must write the consequence — the real thing it protects (“closing without a signed disclosure exposes the brokerage”). Ace refuses to save a blocking gate with no stated reason; that one rule is what keeps this from turning into an unaccountable wall of red tape.
5. Mark the two or three items that genuinely need sign-off (not every item) with the approval requirement, and set who can approve — TC or admin roles.
6. Save. Existing rooms on the old template are offered a drift/sync so open deals don't silently fall out of date with your new rules.

The gate model

A gate strength is a deliberate choice, not a default:

• Advisory — informational only, never stops anyone.
• Attested — an agent (or TC) can cross by checking a box and stating why. That attestation is permanent: actor, timestamp, reason, and exactly which requirements were outstanding at the time. There is no override that leaves no record.
• Blocking — the phase genuinely cannot be crossed until the requirements clear. When a forward move crosses multiple phases at once, Ace evaluates every gate in the span the move crosses, not just the destination — so a blocking gate two phases back can't be skipped by jumping ahead.

An item that stops applying (say, a financing-contingency item on a cash deal) is retired honestly: if nothing has been done on it, it's simply removed; if work is already logged, it's marked “not applicable” with a stated reason instead of silently vanishing and losing the record.

Approvals

Only items you mark approval-required park in a “submitted” state waiting on a reviewer — everything else auto-completes when the agent checks it, which is what keeps the 90% case a one-tap action instead of a review queue. A reviewer can accept or return with a note; a returned item's re-submission creates a new version rather than overwriting the old one, so the history of what was rejected and why stays visible.

When an agent needs a document released back to them (say, to correct and re-upload), the request shows up on your Releases queue and on the room itself — it's a real request-and-resolve loop, not a side conversation.

The board and the audit trail

The Back Office board shows every open room across the team: owner (or a named reason when unknown — never a fake “Unassigned”), phase, close countdown, checklist progress, overdue items, missing key parties, and pending approvals. Every phase move, attestation, approval, and document action lands in a permanent, exportable audit log — the record a broker review actually needs.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to open rooms on a template I change?
Ace never silently rewrites an in-progress checklist. You'll see a drift preview and choose whether to propagate the change; nothing done or waived is touched.

Can an agent skip a blocking gate?
Only if you set that gate to attested instead of blocking — and even then, every crossing is logged with a reason.

Does approving a document notify the client?
No. Nothing in Transaction Manager sends a message to anyone automatically — every notification stays internal to your team.

Can I export the audit trail?
Yes, as CSV, from the board.

Related articles

• Your Transactions in Ace: the Room, the Checklist, and Asking Questions
• Back Office: Commissions, Cap Tracking and Transactions

Last updated: August 2026