# Portfolio reviews and decisions

> Deciding what to continue, scale, fix, pause or retire once an initiative is live, and how Portfolio Review keeps those decisions on a schedule.
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> Source: https://roiva.ai/docs/portfolio-reviews-and-decisions
> Checked against the product on October 04, 2026

Approval gets an initiative into implementation. Once it's live, the question changes to whether it keeps its place in the portfolio. A **portfolio decision** answers that, and Roiva keeps each one as part of the initiative's record.

#### The five outcomes

- **Continue** — keep running it as it is.
- **Scale** — widen it: more teams, volume or spend.
- **Fix** — keep it running, but something has to change before the next review.
- **Pause** — stop work for now. The initiative moves to Paused; a later continue, scale or fix resumes it.
- **Retire** — stop it for good. The initiative moves to Completed.

Every decision needs a reason, written for whoever reads it next quarter. It also keeps the cost to date, cash value, freed capacity and cash ROI at the moment it was made, so a later review shows the call against the numbers it was made on, not today's.

A decision can't be edited. If you change your mind, record a new one.

#### Recording a decision

Open a live initiative and choose **Record Decision**. For a paused initiative that was live, or a live one with no approved value yet, it's in the **…** menu. Pick an outcome, write the reason, and set **Next Review**: when the initiative should come back up. Roiva suggests a date from the outcome; leave it blank to review it only when someone chooses to.

The initiative's **Decisions** tab lists every decision on it, newest first.

Account Owners and Admins can record decisions, and so can anyone named as an approver on the initiative's approval chain.

#### Portfolio Review

On **Initiatives**, choose the **Performance** lens. It lists the same initiatives as the other lenses, each with its stage, owner, cost to date, cash value, how that cash is running against the plan for the months since it went live (**vs Plan**, the one column you can sort by), cash ROI and last decision. A row that's late against its time-to-value target says so. Only running initiatives (live, or paused while live) take a decision; the rest say **Not running**. Running initiatives that have never been decided, or whose review date has come, are due and sort first.

The lens is one of three ways of looking at the same list: **Portfolio** is what each initiative is, **Readiness** is what it still needs before it has a measured ROI, and **Performance** is how it is doing and what was decided. Switching keeps your search.

**Start Review** walks the due initiatives one at a time. Sample initiatives are listed and tagged **Sample**, but once your account has a real initiative they're left out of the walk. Record a decision and choose **Record and next**, or choose **Skip** to leave one for later.

#### Where decisions show up

Each decision is written to the initiative's activity feed and the audit log, and the account export includes every decision. The initiative's review report lists them alongside its stage changes. See [The initiative lifecycle](https://roiva.ai/docs/initiative-lifecycle).