The basic ideas

Delta Flow looks after one thing: that nothing gets into the documents a company relies on without being noticed. It does so by keeping what is in force apart from what is being worked on. Everything else follows from that.

The approved version

What is in force right now. Anyone with access to the project can read the documents of the approved version, print them and link to them — but nobody can overwrite them directly. Not you, not an administrator, not the AI agent.

In the drawing above it is the bottom line. There is one, and it keeps going; everything else leaves it and comes back to it.

A draft

Your working copy of the whole project. In a draft you write, delete and try things out — and the approved version does not change by a comma. It is like “Save as…” for an entire folder at once, with one important difference: Delta Flow remembers what the copy was made from and can later bring your edits back into the original.

There can be several drafts at the same time. Each has a name that says what it is about — “Shorter warranty deadlines”, “Spring price list” — and work in one never gets mixed into another.

A change

Anything in which the draft differs from the approved version. Every change shows in the text: green for what was added, amber for what was reworded, red and struck through for what was removed. You do not have to remember what you edited — it is on the page.

In progress and accepted

A change has two states. In progress (the app calls it Live) is fresh: somebody wrote it — you, a colleague or the agent — and nobody has confirmed it yet. Accepted is a change somebody has gone through and confirmed with the ✓ button.

Accepting is not publishing. An accepted change still lives only in the draft; it merely says “this is done and may go further”.

Publishing

The moment the accepted changes of a draft become part of the approved version and everybody sees them. In the drawing it is where the upper line comes back into the lower one. Only what is accepted gets published; changes still in progress stay in the draft and you can keep working on them.

Asking for approval

When you want somebody else to look at the draft before it is published — a manager, a colleague from quality — you ask them for approval. They get a notification and an e-mail with a link, and go through the draft. It is an agreement between people, not a gate: the app does not forbid publishing without it.

History

Every saved state of a document is kept. At any time you can see what a document looked like a week ago and who has changed it since, and bring an earlier version back when needed. Nothing is lost because somebody wrote over it.

All of it together