Critical Rules

This page is for the people who change the integration, not for a chapter going through its rollout. If you are a chapter, you want what happens stage by stage instead.

Each rule below exists because something real breaks on the other side of it: an approved member who never gets a payment link, corrupted data in Altai, or a live form that stops working for people mid-application.

Do not approve anyone for real before payments are live

The ChargeBee payment trigger is switched off in production until the agreed go-live date. Until then the HubSpot pipeline is for tracking only.

If somebody reaches approval before that date, run them through the legacy system instead. Approving them in HubSpot early starts a journey that ends with no payment link and a person waiting.

The Altai push fires on one stage, and it is not the last one

The push into Altai happens on a single stage change: moving into Global Approval.

It is not when the deal closes, and it is not at Payment Request, which is only the waiting-for-money state that follows. Firing at the wrong point is exactly how integration bugs get in. Do not change the timing without written sign-off from the integration owner.

Every record we create in Altai must be marked as ours

Anything created through the HubSpot to Altai connection carries a source identifier, so records we made can always be told apart from records that were already there.

That matters for working out what went wrong later, and for the cleanup that runs across hundreds of legacy workflows.

Build new forms in the sandbox, never in production

A new application form is built and proven in the sandbox. The production form stays live and untouched until the whole application-to-payment journey has worked end to end in the sandbox.

Swapping the production form early breaks applications for real people who are part way through.

Write decisions in the tracker, not in chat

Decisions, status changes and updates go in the shared project tracker. Chat is for urgent alerts only.

A decision that lives in a chat thread is a decision nobody can find in three weeks.

Leave marketing workflows alone until marketing says otherwise

The cleanup targets stale contact fields and legacy workflows that are not marketing.

Marketing workflows stay until the marketing team explicitly confirms they are finished with them. Removing one early can stop a campaign that is running.

Where do you go next?

• Application to Member flow. The journey these rules protect, stage by stage.
• FAQ. What chapters ask before they sign off.
• What happens to your chapter, stage by stage. The chapter-facing walkthrough.