**Source:** https://heykiku.com/glossary/conflicting-documentation

# Document Conflicts

A freelancer on a discovery call quotes the client $8k for the package. Confident, professional, completely wrong—the rate moved to $12k two months ago. The old number was in a pricing doc on the shared Drive. The new number was in a Notion page the account team updated. Neither replaced the other; they just coexist, and the freelancer opened the one that came up first. **Now the account manager is on cleanup duty, explaining to a client why the price they were quoted yesterday isn't real.**

That's a document conflict: two sources that contradict each other on the same fact, both still treated as current. It happens because agency knowledge doesn't live in one place. A rate lands in a Drive spreadsheet, gets revised in a Notion doc, and is also sitting in a PDF the founder emailed a client once and never thought about again. Each was right when it was written. Nobody flagged that they now disagree, because flagging a contradiction requires somebody to be holding both versions side by side—and nobody ever is.

The damage is specifically a trust problem, and it's contagious. Quote the wrong price once and the client wonders what else is wrong. The freelancer who got burned stops trusting the docs and starts pinging the founder to confirm everything, which is exactly the bottleneck documentation was supposed to remove. **One unresolved contradiction doesn't just cause one bad quote—it teaches the team that the knowledge base can't be trusted, so they route around it.**

heykiku doesn't referee which of two documents is right — agency knowledge has no oracle. What it does: documents live in one library with a review clock, and nothing the team can ask about got there without a person approving it. When two files disagree, a person still has to decide. The [review interval](https://heykiku.com/glossary/knowledge-decay) and the approval step are how that decision gets a place to happen, instead of waiting for a freelancer to quote the wrong number on a client call.

## Related terms

- [Single Source of Truth](https://heykiku.com/glossary/single-source-of-truth)
- [Knowledge Decay](https://heykiku.com/glossary/knowledge-decay)
- [Approval Workflow](https://heykiku.com/glossary/approval-workflow)
- [Freelancer Access Control](https://heykiku.com/glossary/freelancer-access-control)