Judgment Retention Ratio

Judgment Retention Ratio is the share of back-office steps that still route through a named human reviewer, measured against the share fully delegated to software or agents. Agencies that drive the ratio toward zero win on cost per deliverable but inherit silent failure modes: a misclassified contractor, a duplicate vendor payment, a compliance flag nobody read. The framework says pick the ratio per workflow, not per company. High-volume, low-variance work (invoice entry, bank reconciliation, contractor tax forms) tolerates near-total delegation. Client-specific exceptions (rate overrides, jurisdiction quirks, disputed line items) need a checkpoint. Woodrow's agent model connects to ERPs and bank portals and executes reconciliations and AP/AR without engineering work, which is exactly the volume tier where delegation pays. Totum AI reads bills from voice notes, images, and PDFs into ERP entries, so the checkpoint belongs at exception handling, not data capture. WorkMarket automates contractor onboarding, verification, and payment, leaving classification disputes as the human gate. Set the ratio deliberately, document it in the retainer scope, and revisit it quarterly.