Assignment Policy
What It Is
An assignment policy expresses the customer’s answer to where an address belongs. It combines a workspace switch, a selection of participating record kinds, an address source for each kind and an ordered collection of geographic rules. Staff can use a narrow postal area, a set of states, a set of countries or a fallback to describe the regional map they need.
The policy is shared rather than copied onto every person. A contact or organization supplies its deciding address when processing needs a placement. Saved rules then determine the target region. This separation lets administrators alter coverage without editing every record immediately. It also makes the point at which existing records adopt new coverage an explicit operational choice.
What It Is Not
The policy is separate from the catalogue of regional names and from the region currently stored on a record. A saved change can therefore coexist with older placements. It is also separate from a record’s automatic-assignment override, which preserves an individual exception. Geographic coverage here determines placement rather than query eligibility or membership entitlement.
How It Is Used
Administrators inspect saved settings on the Assignment Rules tab and open the separate editor to change them. The editor stages settings, rule edits and ordering together. Staff review validation issues and coverage warnings before saving the draft. Readers can inspect the saved configuration and use address preview without changing the policy.
Preview evaluates saved rules, so checking an edited policy means saving it and returning to the view. Integrations can maintain a single rule through the API, although the current console saves the complete policy. These two write paths share settings-version coordination, but whole-list replacement resets individual rule versions and leaves a known concurrency gap. After changing policy, staff use recalculation to update existing eligible placements.
Its Facets
Assignment switch. The workspace can pause placement while retaining rules. It may also enable placement before coverage exists.
Participating records. Contacts, organizations or both can participate. An excluded record kind remains outside automatic regional assignment.
Address source. Each kind uses its preferred address or an address of one named type. The console’s new-choice filters are narrower than the service’s existence checks.
Geographic coverage. Each rule holds the criteria appropriate to its kind and names a workspace region. Postal coverage can additionally be restricted to a country.
Evaluation order. Earlier geographic matches win. Fallback coverage is reserved until other criteria miss, with the final enabled fallback supplying the result.
Rule availability and explanation. Staff can disable a rule without deleting it and retain a note about its purpose. Notes do not affect matching.
Policy generation. Writes count policy changes and record a display time. Successful recalculations record the generation under which they began.
Saved-address preview. Staff receive the region, winning rule and explanation for one address without changing records.
How It Relates
Regional definitions supply the targets, while placements retain the selected region on each record. Recalculation applies the shared policy to existing eligible records. Contact and organization address types provide the named address sources; their ownership remains with record configuration.
What It Could Become
The product should resolve inactive-target matching and whether reversed postal intervals should be refused at save. It should preserve meaningful individual-rule versions across whole-policy replacement before relying on both editing paths concurrently. A future draft-preview experience would need to distinguish unsaved coverage from the currently saved policy.