Every figure traces to a source, at field level.

A list of datasets at the back of a study tells you what was consulted. It does not tell you where this number came from. TracePrep records the tie one figure at a time, so your Reviewer can inspect a derivation instead of trusting it.

A source list is not a source

Most studies cite their data in aggregate. A public wage table, a methodology paragraph, a page of references. Read all of it and you still cannot answer the question that actually gets asked at review: where did this figure come from? The problem is not honesty. It is resolution. Evidence cited at the document level cannot be checked at the figure level. TracePrep records the tie at the figure level from the beginning, because a citation assembled after the fact is a reconstruction rather than a trail.

Five attributes on every figure

Each material figure in a Study carries five attributes. The source it came from. The occupation it was matched to. The geography it applies to. The period it covers. The transformation applied to get from the published value to the figure on the page. Five attributes, recorded at field level, on every figure. The Study does not present a number without them. That is the difference between evidence that is documented and evidence that is inspectable.

The evidence manifest is immutable

When a Study is finalized, its evidence is sealed into a manifest. The manifest lists every source snapshot the Study drew on, at the version it was drawn at. Public wage data gets revised. A finalized Study does not move with it. Three years from now the manifest still describes the evidence exactly as it stood on the day the Reviewer signed, which is the state anyone asking about that Study will need to see.

Why this matters

For the Reviewer

You can inspect a derivation before you sign it. Open any figure, read its source, occupation, geography, period, and transformation, and decide. No rebuilding the analysis to find out whether it holds.

For the Firm

A question about a Study three years from now gets answered from the manifest instead of from memory. The evidence is still in the Firm’s hands, and it still describes what it described on the day of sign-off.

Related features

Questions

What does "traceable at field level" actually mean?
The tie between a figure and its evidence is recorded per figure, not per document. For any material figure in a Study you can see the source it came from, the occupation it was matched to, the geography and period it covers, and the transformation applied. A study that lists its datasets in a bibliography is traceable at the document level. That is a different thing, and it is the one that fails at review.
Does TracePrep decide whether the compensation figure is correct?
No. TracePrep makes the process inspectable. The Reviewer reaches the conclusion and signs off on it. A finished number reads the same whether it is right or wrong, so what TracePrep supplies is the trail that lets a professional check how it was built and apply their own judgment.
What happens when the underlying wage data is revised?
Sources are versioned. A finalized Study points at the snapshot it was built on, and the evidence manifest records that version. Later revisions to public data do not move a Study that has already been signed.

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