The Temporal Layer
When your declared configuration stops describing your fund
A staleness flag is a reminder to review the record behind a score. It can reflect time since an update or a change in recorded deployment; it does not, on its own, judge the 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
Configuration neglect
No fund-level field has been changed in the past 180 days while the fund holds active investments.
Operational drift
The recorded deployment measure has moved by more than 20 percentage points since the last configuration update. It uses initial and follow-on investment amounts relative to fund size, not LP capital- call records.
The two triggers ask different questions: has the fund record been updated recently, and has recorded deployment changed materially since that update? Neither establishes why the record is old or whether the investment strategy has changed.
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.
How active investments affect the flag
The 180-day inactivity trigger applies only while the fund holds active investments. The deployment-change trigger is separate and can still apply without active positions.
This distinction matters for funds with exited positions or changing deployment records. Read the stated reason for the flag rather than assuming it depends only on time since the last edit.
What it does not mean
It does not invalidate the scores. Every reading keeps computing against the configuration on file, under the same calculation rules. What the flag adds is that any reader can see the inputs may be out of date, which is information about the reading rather than a correction to it.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.
Open the fund record and review the inputs against current activity. Correct anything out of date, then check the saved result and the reason for any remaining flag. Simply viewing the record should not be treated as proof that the flag has cleared.
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.