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Advisor reasons over your Process Index, so the attributes on your process nodes are the quantitative substrate under everything it produces. This page covers which fields it does arithmetic with, how much precision the decision in front of you actually needs, and which attributes carry each kind of value case. For what the attributes are, how their values get set, and how to correct one, see Maintaining your process attributes.
The rule this page is built around. You don’t need an accurate number — you need a number accurate enough for the decision in front of you, and you need to know which one you have. Choosing where to look first tolerates being 50% out. A funded business case doesn’t. Most of the effort people spend chasing precision goes on questions that never needed it.

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What Advisor does with them

Attributes feed Advisor in six distinct ways, and they are not equally load-bearing:
  • Active Work Time × Annual Volume is the effort arithmetic behind time-savings estimates and automation assessments. This is the pair to get right, and both halves matter equally — a careful Active Work Time against a guessed volume gives you a precise-looking wrong answer.
  • Cycle Time − Active Work Time is where wait time and rework surface. Advisor uses that gap to point at queues, approvals and handoffs — the waste that never appears in an effort total. See What Cycle Time is actually for.
  • Key Control shapes what Advisor will recommend automating. A step that prevents or detects error is treated differently from a routine one.
  • Systems Used and Teams Involved drive scoping and hand-off analysis.
  • Numbered stage folders tell Advisor the order your stages run in — see Naming conventions and taxonomy hygiene.
  • A pinned standard turns attributes into a standard-versus-reality comparison — see Set your process standard (UDS).
In short: Advisor answers whether or not the attribute is populated — it reasons around gaps rather than refusing. So ask it to show its work. Adding “Include any assumptions or gaps” to your prompt makes it name the processes where it had no figure, which is the fastest audit of your own data you can run.

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How much accuracy you actually need

Work out which decision you’re making first. The precision each one needs is very different, and so is the effort to get there.
The most common mistake here isn’t inaccuracy — it’s spending audit-grade effort on a prioritisation-grade question. Decide which row you’re in before you start gathering.

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The confidence ladder

The capture paths on Maintaining your process attributes are ranked by confidence, highest first. This ladder runs the opposite way on purpose: it ranks them by effort, cheapest first — so it starts at the lowest-confidence end, and each rung asks the platform to deduce less and tells it more.
  1. Not populated — Advisor is reasoning without the field at all.
  2. One Companion session (low confidence) — a single pass, possibly a partial one.
  3. Companion across a full cycle (low confidence) — still deduced, but the range now covers the hard weeks.
  4. A recording or document (medium confidence) — a figure the material states, or one observed pass.
  5. A Subject Matter Expert interview (high confidence) — with the basis stated on the record.
  6. A manual edit (high confidence) — with its basis in the change note.
  7. A human-approved figure pinned as a standard (high confidence, and held) — with the observed version kept alongside it.
You rarely need to climb past step 3 — low confidence is perfectly adequate for deciding where to look. Steps 6 and 7 are for figures someone will be asked to defend.

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What kind of value are you proving?

The table above says how precise you need to be. This says which fields — because the attributes that carry your argument depend entirely on what you’re trying to prove. Almost every case falls into one of four.

Cost & Efficiency

Hours given back (soft) and money not spent (hard) — headcount, overtime, contractor and vendor spend.

Quality, Experience & Expectations

Whether the work lands on time and lands right — SLA commitments, error and rework rates, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Revenue

Where process speed turns into cash — DSO, collections, order-to-cash, renewals, expansion and retention.

Risk

Controls, compliance and audit defensibility — what prevents, detects or corrects error, fraud and non-compliance.

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Where to spend your effort

You don’t need high confidence on everything — that’s the point of having a scale at all. Pick the case you’re arguing, put the human effort into the two or three fields that actually carry it, and leave the rest to Companion.
The fields that carry it: Active Work Time × Annual Volume, then Roles and ResponsibilitiesThe first two are the effort total. The third gives you the role — and the role is what turns hours into a blended rate, which is what turns soft dollars into hard ones. The rate itself isn’t a Within attribute; you supply that. Sanity-check Annual Volume against Frequency before you trust it.
The fields that carry it: Cycle Time, then Exception HandlingThis is the case where the field you need is the field you’re told to distrust. Cycle Time is directional by default — so if you’re committing to an SLA, it has to be stamped by a person rather than inferred. Exception Handling is where SLAs actually break, and it’s usually more useful than the headline number.
The fields that carry it: Cycle Time and ScopeIn order-to-cash or collections, wait time isn’t just waste — it’s working capital. DSO is elapsed time, not effort, so Cycle Time is the field that carries it. Scope matters just as much: the trigger and end condition are what tell you where the clock starts and stops. Get the boundaries wrong and the number is meaningless however precise it is.
The fields that carry it: Key Control, Roles and Responsibilities, Exception HandlingNever leave Key Control inferred — it’s binary and high-consequence. Roles carries decision authority and segregation of duties; Exception Handling carries the escalation path. Systems Used matters here too as the system of record. This is also the case where you pin the result as a standard rather than letting captures move it.
The rule of thumb worth remembering. Only cost cases live on Active Work Time. SLA, revenue and risk all lean on Cycle Time or the narrative fields — which is why “only stamp Cycle Time when confidence is high” matters more than it first appears. If what you’re proving isn’t a pure cost case, you are going to need a human-set Cycle Time sooner or later.

Maintaining your process attributes

What the fields are, where their values come from, and how to raise confidence in one.

Running an Advisor analysis

Get an analysis running against the processes you have captured.

Strategic analysis with Advisor

Take the output from process-level findings to a portfolio view.

Set your process standard (UDS)

Pin an approved figure so captures cannot drift it.