How do I start the year with a clean AI activity record?
A handover brings the recorded AI work and its verifiable receipts into one proof link. Review the evidence behind each claim, check what was and was not observed, then Accept or Flag.
"Clean" tempts people toward deletion, which is the opposite of this page's method. A clean record is one whose boundary is exact: everything before the line is last year's, archived as a unit with its manifest, and everything after it belongs to a year whose structures were set before its first job ran. Auditors, accountants, and your own December self all read boundaries; nobody is helped by a purge.
The closeout half follows the project-archive discipline at year scale: the year's index finalised (gaps marked, pending decisions chased or carried forward with notes), the exports verified from your own storage, the manifest written. The opening half is the January setup from the other side: new index started, quarterly pull dates in the calendar, retention dates for the new year's classes set, and the access inventory re-confirmed as the year's first entry, because the inventory is the one document that must never have a gap year.
Do both halves in the same sitting if you can. The ritual quality is functional: a team that watches the founder close one year and open the next in an afternoon learns that records are how this business remembers, and behaves accordingly for the next twelve months.
Checklist: closing one year, opening the next
Close: 1. Finalise last year's index: gaps marked, open items carried forward with named owners. 2. Verify the year's exports from your storage; one receipt per quarter recomputed. 3. Write the year manifest: contents, locations, retention dates, owner. Open: 4. Start the new index, empty, dated, with the carried-forward items as its first rows. 5. Set the year's calendar: quarterly pulls, October cleanup, access reviews. 6. Re-confirm the access inventory as the new year's first record. Rule: the boundary is a date, not a deletion; everything before it stays findable under its manifest.
Worked example
The boundary's readability test: a stranger handed last year's manifest should reach a record like https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 from the index alone, and a stranger handed the new year's index should see only this year's jobs plus the carried-forward rows, labelled. If both tests pass in the same afternoon, the year started clean.
Frequently asked questions
Can I do this mid-year, or must it be January?
Any boundary works: a financial year end, a quarter, a relaunch. The method is identical; only the label changes. January is the natural date for calendar-year businesses, which is why the page wears it.
What happens to handovers still open at the boundary?
They carry forward as the new index's first rows, with their age and chase history intact. An open item that crosses a year boundary visibly is an honest record; one silently dropped from the index is how year-end mysteries are manufactured.
Should old records be moved to cheaper storage?
They can, provided the manifest is updated with the new locations and the verification test is re-run from the new home. A record whose location the manifest gets wrong is, operationally, a lost record.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai