The shortcut to question
A purchasing manager emails a draft contract beneath a company signature. It is tempting to turn that familiar sender into an authorized representative in the CRM. Yet the message supports a possible contact and organizational association. It does not establish that the person owns the obligation or can sign this agreement. Confidence about identity cannot fill a gap in authority evidence.
Keep the questions separate
The proposed model links separate person, company and role records to supporting evidence. Record what the person may confirm, for which organization and during which period. Operational knowledge, employment, approval and signing are different claims. A role change should not silently rewrite earlier correspondence. Unverified roles should remain visible candidates, and identity decisions should be reversible.
Entity resolution offers a useful distinction: selecting candidate pairs differs from deciding whether they represent the same object. Even a confirmed identity match leaves the separate authority question open.
A hypothetical limit
Suppose a company document authorizes this manager to sign purchase contracts up to EUR 5,000, but the attached draft totals EUR 20,000. This is an invented boundary case, not a research result. Identity, employment and some signing authority could all be verified, while authority for this transaction remains unsupported.
The practical rule is to match the evidence to the proposed action, organization, amount and validity period. An exceeded limit calls for relevant additional authorization evidence; a generic trusted contact label cannot supply it.
A practical review
Review illustrative cases involving an employee, an external adviser and a shared procurement mailbox. For each, ask whether a reviewer can distinguish communication, employment and signing authority, locate the supporting evidence and leave missing authority unresolved. These are proposed checks of usefulness, not established outcomes.
Blocking and Filtering Techniques for Entity Resolution: A Survey (doi:10.1145/3377455) addresses candidate comparison methods. Only its abstract and introduction were inspected for the source article. Applying that distinction to CRM policy is an ABOLTUS design interpretation. ABOLTUS is in development; these proposals are not claims of available features or measured performance.