An assistant that can issue refunds
An agent with authority over money. One day of its work shows the whole problem.
What the day looks like
this one day so far
refund #1 $40 $0 -> approved
refund #2 $120 $40 -> approved
...
refund #38 $150 $4,910 -> approved
refund #39 $60 $5,060 -> REVIEW
queue: finance
no answer in 24h -> reject Every one of those is a good decision. A refund is small, it makes a customer happy, and a human approving each one adds cost and delay to something that should take seconds.
The thirty-ninth is not wrong either. The total is. So the control cannot look at one refund at a time: the rule has to remember.
The timeout matters as much as the threshold
A queue nobody watches is worse than no queue: it silently holds money back, or silently lets it through. So the rule declares what happens if nobody decides the case within a day. Here that answer is reject.
The same shape, larger
Replace the refund with a transfer, a claim payment or a credit line and the mechanism does not change: a counter over an entity, a threshold, and a declared answer when nobody responds. Business rules, and human review for the escalation half.