HR & Payroll v0.39.4-dev Consolidated — PRE-FREEZE HANDOFF NOTE
Project: HRPAY-BMD-20260911-01

WHY THIS NOTE EXISTS
The source-level QA remediation is substantially complete, but the actual Django migration snapshot cannot be generated in the build container because Django dependencies cannot be installed there. The next acceptance gate therefore runs on the Local UAT machine, where the maintenance team already has Python/internet/runtime access.

FIRST LOCAL ACTION
1. Extract this package to a NEW folder.
2. Do not overwrite the working v0.37.x folder or its .env/database.
3. Run 00-FREEZE-MIGRATIONS-WINDOWS.bat.
4. Wait for RESULT: PASS in MIGRATION-FREEZE-RESULT.txt.
5. Keep/send back:
   - MIGRATION-FREEZE-RESULT.txt
   - all generated backend\apps\*\migrations\*.py files
6. Only after migration review, create/use a FRESH PostgreSQL UAT database and run 01-SETUP-LOCAL-UAT-WINDOWS.bat.

DO NOT
- Do not point this pre-final source directly at the old v0.37.x database whose initial migrations were generated ad hoc.
- Do not manually edit migration files or database tables.
- Do not mark QA-011 or QA-094 closed without runtime evidence.

CURRENT STATIC STATUS
- P0/Critical: 18/18 source-level evidence PASS; runtime proof pending.
- P1: 33/33 source-level evidence PASS; runtime proof pending.
- P2/P3 verified improvements: 18 source-level evidence PASS (including QA-016 documentation consistency and QA-027 requester attribution).
- Pre-freeze model/schema audit: 53 models, 95 relations and 43 constraint/index declarations checked; no static schema blocker detected.
- Migration-freeze tooling now preflights/repairs Python-Django dependencies and runs Django system check before generation.
- Final package consistency is re-run after integrity regeneration; see PREFINAL-REVIEW-STATIC-VERIFICATION-v0.39.4.txt and verify again after extraction.
- 22 historical FIXED findings are mapped in FIXED-ITEMS-RUNTIME-REGRESSION-CHECKLIST.csv.

NEXT EVIDENCE AFTER FREEZE
Run setup/smoke tests, then complete the FIXED-items + P0/P1/P2 runtime checklists, physical FO-M1 test, parallel payroll reconciliation and PostgreSQL backup/restore evidence.