Specification History

Why Specification History Matters

A tax stamp programme's design can change over the years — a new security feature is added, a substrate is changed, or a completely new specification is rolled out. The platform tracks these transitions explicitly rather than only recording the current design, so you can see how a programme has evolved.

How It Works

Each link between a programme and a specification records:

• Start Year — When the programme began using that specification
• End Year — When it stopped, if it has been retired
• Status — Active, Discontinued, or Planned

A specification without an end year and marked Active is the programme's current specification. A programme can have more than one current specification at once if it runs parallel designs.

Reading the History on a Programme Page

On a programme's detail page, the current specification(s) are shown first, followed by a specification history list of everything that came before — each entry shows the specification name, the years it was in use, and its status. This is useful for understanding, for example, when a country's authority moved from a paper stamp with a hologram to a stamp with a machine-readable code.