When your declared configuration stops describing your fund

What a staleness flag is

A marker that a fund's configuration has stopped being maintained while the fund has carried on deploying capital. It says the inputs may no longer describe the fund; it says nothing about the fund.

The two conditions

The two describe different situations. The first is a General Partner who has stopped touching the record at all. The second is a firm still actively managing itself whose declared position has simply fallen behind what the fund is doing, which is the more common and more forgivable case.

Where both apply, the first takes precedence, because a record nobody has touched in six months is stale regardless of what else is true of it.

A fund with no active investments cannot go stale

Worth stating because its absence would otherwise look like a bug. A fund holding no active positions will not raise a staleness flag no matter how long its configuration has sat untouched.

The reasoning is that staleness is a signal about a fund whose reality is moving away from its record. A fully exited or not-yet-deployed fund has no moving reality to diverge from, so a prompt to refresh it would be asking for work with nothing behind it.

What it does not mean

It does not invalidate the scores. Every reading keeps computing against the configuration on file, and the numbers are exactly as correct as they were. What the flag adds is that any reader can see the inputs may be out of date, which is information about the reading rather than a correction to it.

It is not a judgment about the firm. A staleness flag is not a finding, does not appear in any tension or flag list, and does not affect the Architecture Score or any engine score. It sits beside the reading rather than inside it.

It does not imply anything went wrong. The most common cause is a firm that has been busy investing, which is the activity the record exists to describe. A configuration going stale during a heavy deployment period is close to expected.

It does not guess at what changed. The platform will not infer an updated configuration from the portfolio. It flags the divergence and leaves the correction to the person who knows what the firm actually decided.

What it does mean, and what to do

That the fund is a candidate for a configuration review, and that anyone reading its scores, including an LP shown them, should know the inputs have not been confirmed recently.

The action is small and it is the same in both cases: open the fund record and confirm or correct what is there. Most of the time nothing has changed and the confirmation itself clears the flag. Where something has changed, restating it re-bases every subsequent reading and leaves a dated record of the change, which is the artifact that makes the eventual LP conversation straightforward.

A stale configuration and a drifting one are related but not the same thing. When your fund stops looking like the one you raised covers the wider question of a declared setup diverging from what a fund became, of which staleness is the detectable subset.