Stale-After Date

What it is

A stale-after date is recorded alongside a claim to mark the point at which its supporting evidence should be treated as expired until someone re-checks it. It encodes how long the evidence is expected to hold, not how long the claim is expected to be used. An audit report has a fixed window, a headcount figure ages in weeks, and a published price may be stable for a year — the same sentence structure, three very different expiry horizons.

Why it matters

Recording expiry in a field rather than a calendar reminder is what lets it be checked by a machine and fail loudly. Regulated content systems have worked this way for years, though the date may sit on the material rather than on the claim. In Veeva Vault, the platform behind PromoMats, expiry is a policy someone configures rather than a property every approved document has: an admin sets a default expiration period on the lifecycle, so one document type can expire a year after approval while another never expires automatically. Where it is set, expiry is an automated state change that moves the document out of a state such as Approved for Distribution — Veeva calls it "simply an automated state change with associated notifications". Withdrawing that content from the channels it was published to has its own actions, but expiry can drive them: "By default, the CRM Content Lifecycle withdraws documents as an entry action for the Expired state". Claims are held separately from documents, as records in a central claims library. What Vault automates there is linking approved claims into new material, pulling their references with them. A claim carries no expiry of its own; it inherits one from its evidence — when a reference document moves to the Obsolete state, Vault archives the anchors that used it and sends an approved claim back to Draft. Knowledge Company stamps every entry in this dictionary with the date it was last reviewed, on the same principle. The important nuance is what the date means: it says our knowledge expired, not that the claim became false.