EBA Known Gap: Manual Review

With the Program's automatic decisions off, the site still shows the booking calendar right after an application is submitted, so applicants can book before anyone reviews them. Two ways to fix it.

Status: open, not fixed. For now, keep automatic decisions on for the Everything But Asana™ Certification Program in Adhara. With them on, nothing below applies. See EBA Application Funnel for how the whole funnel works.

The gap

The site chooses the page an applicant sees after they submit without asking Adhara. It reads the applicant’s own investment answer and repeats the “Not ready to invest” rule locally (ebaRedirect() in src/lib/ebaFlags.ts):

That only matches what Adhara does while the Program’s automatic decisions are on. Turn them off to review every application by hand, and this happens:

1. In Adhara, the application stays in Received with only the “EBA Certification Applicant” tag and no email, waiting for review. That part is correct.
2. On the site, the applicant still lands on /eba-application/submitted and can book an Application Call straight away, before anyone has reviewed them.
3. Adhara only attaches a booking to an application that’s already Approved (find_application() in adhara_web/backend/app/services/programs/booking_match.py). A call booked by someone still in Received is a plain calendar booking. It isn’t attached to their application, there’s no Call Booked stage or tag, and the scorecard doesn’t count it.

There’s a second, smaller way for this to go wrong: if someone edits or adds a rule in Adhara (for example, sending “I would like to learn more about the investment first” to Nurture), the site won’t know, and those applicants still see the booking calendar.

Confirmed on 2026-10-19: test application patrick+ebatest5@eimglobalsolutions.com, sent with automatic decisions off, stayed in Received in Adhara. The site still redirected it to /eba-application/submitted.

Option 1: book only from the approval email

Make /eba-application/submitted a plain “We’ll review your application and be in touch” page with no calendar. The only way to book is the button in Adhara’s approval email, which goes to /eba-application/book.

• Pros: correct whatever the Adhara settings or rules are. Simplest change, site code only: submitted.astro and ebaRedirect(), which could then send everyone to the same page.
• Cons: applicants approved automatically can’t book while they’re still on the site. They have to open the email first, so some momentum is lost.
• Best if: EDM expects to review applications by hand for a while.

Option 2: ask Adhara for the decision when someone submits

After submitting, /api/forms/submit asks Adhara what the Program actually decided, and the site picks the page from that:

• Pros: keeps instant booking when automatic decisions are on, and stays correct when they’re off or when the rules change. ebaRedirect() no longer has to repeat the rules.
• Cons:
  • Key on the live site: the site needs an Adhara API key that can read the Program (programs:read). That key lives only in the local .env today, so it would have to be added to the Vercel project’s environment variables. Use a read-only key, not the programs:manage key setup uses.
  • Finding the application: the public form-submit response would need to return the new application (or its stage). Otherwise the site has to look it up by the applicant’s email straight after submitting.
  • Timing: the site has to wait for the rules to finish before answering. They took under a second in testing.
  • More work: both repos change. adhara_web needs a public or token-scoped way to read the application’s stage, and this site needs the lookup plus the new page.
• Best if: automatic approval stays the normal mode and EDM still wants to switch to manual review sometimes.

Until it’s fixed

• Leave automatic decisions on in the Program.
• If you have to turn them off, check the eba-application-call bookings in Adhara’s scheduling as well as the Program. Those calls won’t appear on the applications (see above). Once an applicant is approved, their application only moves to Call Booked if they book again.