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DSI
Workbook

Post-Award Milestone, Tranche & Closeout Tracker

A tracker for what happens after a treasury award is ratified: milestone evidence, tranche payments, variance, issues, and a documented closeout.

Type
Workbook
Difficulty
Intermediate
Time
50 min
Version
v1.0.0
Updated
8/9/2026
treasurydeliveryaccountability

What this helps you do

Ratification is the start of the obligation, not the end of it. Most of the accountability value in treasury governance sits in the months afterwards, and it is usually nobody's explicit job to look.

This tracker follows one award from ratification to closeout. Each milestone carries its acceptance criteria, expected and actual dates, the evidence produced, the tranche attached to it, and the variance between plan and reality. Issues are logged with a resolution and a date. The closeout section records what was delivered, what was not, and whether the outcome matches what was promised at the vote.

When to use this

  • An award you reviewed has been ratified and you intend to follow it.
  • You are preparing a public delivery update or a monitoring report.
  • A proposer has returned for further funding and you need the prior record.
  • You are closing out an award and want the final position documented.

When NOT to use this

  • The action has not been ratified. Use the milestone funding review sheet at proposal stage instead.
  • You are seeking to penalise a team. This records facts and variance; the response is a separate judgement.

What you'll need

  • The ratified action and its final approved scope and budget
  • The milestone schedule and acceptance criteria as approved
  • The tranche or payment schedule
  • Published progress reports and any on-chain payment evidence

Estimated completion time

50 minutes

Working time for one governance action, assuming the inputs listed here are already to hand.

How to use it

  1. 1Copy the milestone schedule from the approved action, not from a later report by the recipient.
  2. 2Write each acceptance criterion as something an outsider could verify without asking the team.
  3. 3Record expected date and actual date separately and let the variance calculate itself. Never overwrite the expected date.
  4. 4Attach the evidence artefact for each milestone: a link, a commit, a report, an audited figure. Effort descriptions are not evidence.
  5. 5Record the tranche attached to the milestone and whether payment preceded or followed verification.
  6. 6Log issues as they arise with a date, an owner, and a resolution state. Unresolved is a valid state.
  7. 7Update the tracker on a schedule rather than only when something goes wrong, so silence is visible as data.
  8. 8At closeout record delivered, partially delivered, and not delivered against the original scope, plus any funds unspent or returned.
  9. 9Publish the closeout summary. A tracker nobody sees changes nothing.

The tool

Full workbook - v1.0.0

Award

  • Action title and identifier
  • Recipient and delivery partners
  • Total approved amount and denomination
  • Ratification date
  • Delivery period start and end
  • Where reports are published
  • Who the accountable contact is

Milestone register

  • Milestone name and number
  • Acceptance criteria as approved
  • Expected date
  • Actual date
  • Variance in days
  • Evidence artefact and link
  • Independently verifiable: yes or no
  • Verified by, and on what date
  • Status: not started, in progress, delivered, partially delivered, missed, cancelled

Tranches and payments

  • Tranche number and amount
  • Milestone it is attached to
  • Paid before or after verification
  • Payment date and transaction reference
  • Cumulative paid against cumulative verified
  • Amount at risk: paid but not yet verified

Issues and variance

  • Issue description and date raised
  • Category: scope, schedule, cost, quality, personnel, dependency
  • Effect on the milestone or tranche
  • Owner
  • Resolution and resolution date
  • Open, resolved, or accepted as permanent variance
  • Whether the change was disclosed publicly by the recipient or found by you

Closeout

  • Delivered in full, in part, or not delivered, against original scope
  • Total paid against total approved
  • Unspent funds returned, retained, or unaccounted for
  • Outcome against the benefit claimed at the vote
  • Evidence that the outcome persisted after delivery ended
  • Lessons for future proposals of this type
  • Closeout date and where the summary was published
Fictional Example

Invented for illustration. It does not describe a real governance action, proposal, or organisation.

Fictional award: Community Translation Programme

  • Approved 420,000 ADA over four milestones, ratified in epoch 540 (fictional).
  • Milestone 1, glossary published: expected day 30, actual day 34, variance +4 days, evidence a public repository tag, independently verifiable.
  • Milestone 2, first 200 documents translated: expected day 90, actual day 118, variance +28 days, evidence a document index with word counts, verified by sampling ten documents.
  • Tranche 1 of 120,000 ADA paid on ratification, before anything was verifiable. Amount at risk on day 1: 120,000 ADA.
  • Issue raised day 96: two translators left the project. Category personnel. Disclosed by the recipient in their own report before it was asked about.
  • Milestone 3 missed and rescoped from 400 to 300 documents by agreement, recorded as an accepted permanent variance.
  • Closeout: delivered in part. 380,000 ADA paid of 420,000 approved, 40,000 returned. Adoption evidence six months later showed continued use of the glossary but not of the document set.

How to interpret the result

  • Cumulative paid against cumulative verified is the single most useful line in this tracker. A widening gap is a governance exposure, not a delay.
  • A single large variance is often less informative than a pattern of small ones with the same cause.
  • Whether a problem was disclosed by the recipient or discovered by an observer says more about future risk than the problem itself.
  • Milestones delivered on time with unverifiable evidence should not be read as delivered.

Limitations

  • The tracker depends on published evidence. Where a recipient publishes nothing, it records absence rather than failure, and the distinction matters.
  • Variance measures schedule and cost, not value. A late project can still be the better outcome.
  • On-chain payment evidence shows a transfer, not that the work behind it happened.
  • This is an individual monitoring record and carries no contractual force.

Sources and methodology

Downloads

  • Markdown export: the complete tool, including metadata, instructions, the template, limitations, sources and version history.

No other file formats are published for this resource. We list a format only when the file exists.

Version and governance

Current version
v1.0.0
Published
Not recorded
Last updated
8/9/2026
Next scheduled review
2/9/2027
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Editorial status
Not yet externally reviewed

No named reviewer is shown because no external review has been completed. Attribution appears only once a verified reviewer has signed off.

Changelog

  • v1.0.0 (2026-08-09) - First published edition.
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