Found by tracing what happens when a back-dated backfill contract cannot
fetch a historical rate. The failure handling itself was fine — period 0
fails, the backlog halts so nothing settles out of order, five ledger rows
record the reason, no money moves, and the contract auto-pauses once the
retry budget is spent. The recovery was not.
The operator fixes the cause (switches to a stated rate, or to current),
clicks Resume, and periods_done jumps 0 -> 6: every unpaid payday silently
written off, contract back to looking healthy, employee never paid. The
confirm dialog even asserted the missed paydays "are written off" — true of
one kind of pause and a lie about the other.
Two features colliding. "Do not backfill a deliberate pause" is right when
the operator paused: the pause *was* the decision not to pay. It is wrong
when payroll paused, because nobody decided anything — the money is still
owed and the operator has just removed whatever blocked it.
Contracts now carry `paused_reason`, set only when payroll pauses them and
cleared by a deliberate pause. Resume infers from it, and an explicit
`catch_up` still overrides either way. The console asks a different question
for each, quoting the reason, and flags a payroll-paused contract in the
table so the distinction is visible before anyone clicks.
Verified end to end: five failing ticks leave periods_done at 0 and pause
with "period 0 (2026-08-01) failed 5 times: no historical EUR rate
available for 2026-08-01"; resuming after switching to a manual rate keeps
the position at 0, and the next tick settles all seven owed periods.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018jy52j9GRZ6XKa1Zt21LLj
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