What is Full coverage?
Reviewing everything rather than a sample. The gain is rarely speed - it is finding what the unsampled remainder was hiding.
Sampling rests on an assumption that is rarely tested: that what you are looking for is spread evenly across the population. When it is not, the sample under-reports and does so consistently, which is worse than reporting nothing because it produces a number people trust.
On a delivered contract-verification system, checking moved from about a 15% sample to 100% of partner settlements. The first full-coverage cycle surfaced 2.3 times the discrepancy rate the sampled process had been reporting. That multiple is not a claim about model accuracy. It is a measurement of what sampling was hiding - discrepancies were never evenly spread across the partner book, and a sample assumes they are.
| On this | Full coverage | Sampling |
|---|---|---|
| What it assumes | Nothing - every item is examined | That the remainder resembles the sample |
| What a person still does | Reviews the exceptions, which is judgment work | Reads whole documents to decide whether there is an exception |
| What it proves at audit | Every item was checked, with the basis recorded | That a policy was followed, which is a different thing |
- When it is the right answer
- When what you are looking for is unevenly distributed, and particularly where the expensive cases cluster with one supplier, one partner, one site or one shift.
- The service line that delivers this
- Document & Request Triage
It arrives in a shared inbox and goes to whoever has time.
Start here
If a term here is the one your board paper turns on, ask us about it.
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You get a reply within one working day, from the engineer who would do the work - not a sales sequence.