Glossary

Policy gate

The single server-side chokepoint every state-changing agent action passes through. It is a pure function — evaluate(action, match, actor, accounts, rationale, config) — that returns Allow, RequireHumanApproval(clause), or Deny(clause). Because it is a pure function with no I/O, it is unit-testable and reproducible from a git commit.

Reversibility tier

closegate routes every tool by how hard the action is to undo. T0 is read-only, T1 is reversible below materiality, T2 is reversible above materiality (requires one human approval), and T3 is irreversible (requires dual human approval). The tier — not the LLM's confidence — decides whether a human is in the loop.

Segregation of duties (SoD)

The control that no single identity both proposes and confirms a state change. closegate enforces SoD server-side: the LLM's actor identity (llm:*) can propose a match, but a human with a different actor identity must confirm anything above the approval tier. The LLM cannot set its own actor id — the MCP transport binds it.

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval envelope

A queued proposal that carries the verbatim policy clause text plus the full action context, waiting for a human with a distinct actor identity to confirm or reject. closegate ships Slack Block Kit and Teams Adaptive Card approval bots that deeplink back to the envelope.

Audit log

An append-only SQLite table protected by BEFORE UPDATE and BEFORE DELETE database-layer triggers, so rows cannot be mutated or deleted even by an operator with table access. Every gate decision writes a row with the verbatim policy rule text and a JSON-pointer into your policy.yaml.

Materiality threshold

The dollar amount above which an action is escalated from auto-approval to human review. closegate lets you set materiality per account, per jurisdiction, and per action type in policy.yaml — the same way your external auditor scopes materiality for testing.

Eval harness

closegate's continuous evaluation runner scoring four dimensions: matching accuracy, policy enforcement, adversarial robustness, and latency. Run from the CLI, it produces reproducible evidence that satisfies SOC 2 CC4.2 (monitoring of controls) and gives you a regression gate on model or policy changes.

policy.yaml

The declarative configuration that describes your tiers, materiality thresholds, sensitive accounts, SoD rules, and jurisdictional rounding. closegate adapts to your policy.yaml shape rather than forcing a fixed schema; the gate cites JSON-pointers into it on every decision.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

The open protocol for connecting LLM clients to tools. closegate ships an MCP server exposing 19 tier-routed finance tools over stdio, HTTP, and SSE, so any MCP-compliant client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, OpenAI Apps SDK, Mastra, LangGraph) can drive gated finance actions.

SOX 404

Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, requiring management to assess and auditors to attest to the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting (ICFR). closegate ships control mappings and file.py:line citations so an AI agent touching the GL stays inside a SOX-testable control boundary.

SOC 2 Type 2

An attestation that a service organization's controls operated effectively over a period (not just at a point in time). closegate's nightly monitoring loop and audit-evidence-export PBC bundle make the operating effectiveness of the agent's controls demonstrable to your SOC 2 auditor.

NIST AI RMF

The NIST AI Risk Management Framework. closegate maps to the Agentic Profile — Govern, Map, Measure, Manage — so a finance agent deployment can be described in a vocabulary risk and compliance teams already use.

Three-way match

The AP control that reconciles a purchase order, a goods-receipt, and an invoice before payment. It is a canonical closegate workload: the LLM proposes matches at speed; the policy gate decides which ones a human must confirm and records why.

Go deeper: the policy gate, the audit log, HITL envelopes, the eval harness, and the compliance mappings. New here? Start with the quickstart or the how-it-works walkthrough. closegate is built by Neul Labs.