Bookkeeper Workspace

Access levels — what each one means

Per-client per-team-member:

• View — read-only access. Can see documents, notes, history; cannot review, push, or change settings.
• Review — can review documents (approve / correct / reject) and manage day-to-day operations, and can open a QuickBooks push preview. Committing the push requires full access.
• Full — review-level + can manage that client's settings, GL mappings, integrations, and team assignments.

Assign the right level per team member per client. A senior reviewer might have "full" on a few key clients and "review" on the rest; a junior might be "view" until they're trained up.

Adding a client

The most important decision is who pays?

1. Open the Add Client dialog from the Command Center or Clients page.
2. Enter the client's display name and primary contact email.
3. Pick the billing model:

• The client will pay directly — they get their own checkout, manage their own subscription. (Default.)
• My firm will pay on the client's behalf — your firm's Stripe customer is billed; the client doesn't see billing.

1. Optionally invite the client to their portal directly. They become the Portal Owner of that client workspace.
2. The client appears in your roster immediately.

You can change the billing model later, but the cleanest path is to pick the right one upfront.

Adding team members

1. Open Settings → Team → Invite.
2. Enter the team member's email and pick their workspace role:

• Owner — full control, including billing decisions for clients the firm pays for.
• Admin — manages clients and team but doesn't control firm-level billing.
• Member — does day-to-day work on assigned clients.

1. The team member gets an invitation email.
2. After they accept, you assign them to specific clients.

Close readiness (Business plan)

For each client, Tally computes a daily close-readiness score (0–100) from four weighted components:

A failed push to QuickBooks appears as a blocking item inside the score rather than as its own component. Contractor 1099 completeness is not part of this score — it is tracked separately on the tax and compliance surface.

Each client is bucketed green (≥80, close-ready), yellow (60–79, needs work), or red (<60, blocked). A client with no snapshot yet is unrated rather than red. The Command Center surfaces the top blockers across the firm.

Click any client to drill into the specifics — which documents are unreviewed, which transactions are unreconciled, which open loops are outstanding, and which expected documents have not arrived.

Common issues

• "I added a client but they're not in my roster." Refresh. If still missing, the invite may have failed; check Settings → Pending Invites.
• "A team member can't see a client they should." Check the assignment — Settings → Team → that team member → Assignments. Add the client if missing.
• "Close readiness shows red for a client who looks closed to me." Click the client. The score breakdown names the failing component — one of the four above, for example "12 documents unreviewed" or unreconciled bank transactions. Contractor 1099 completeness is not one of them; it is tracked on the tax and compliance surface.
• "I want to stop billing for a client who churned." Open the client drilldown → Plan → Cancel. Stripe handles the proration.
• "I'm the workspace owner and I want to leave." Owners can't leave — there's no ownership-transfer flow yet. If you need to transfer ownership, contact support.

Creating your firm workspace

1. Sign up via the firm path. You become the workspace owner.
2. Name your workspace (your firm's name).
3. You're now ready to add clients.

Under the current model, the firm workspace itself does not carry per-seat fees for bookkeepers — billing happens at the client workspace level. Pricing is subject to change; confirm the current terms during onboarding or in plans-billing.

Firm memory (Business plan)

When your firm consistently handles a class of vendor a particular way ("Adobe Creative Cloud → Software Subscriptions"), that pattern can become firm memory — pre-filling the same mapping for new Adobe invoices in new clients.

Firm memory is patterns extracted from your firm's review behavior. It is not raw client data. Two clients in the same firm never see each other's documents, vendors, or numbers. Firm memory only flows from "patterns your firm reliably uses" → "defaults for new client onboarding."

See How Tally learns for the boundaries.

ROI reports

For each client, Tally counts how many documents she auto-handled and multiplies that by an assumed per-document review time and an assumed fully-loaded labour rate (default $50/hour). This is a model, not a measurement — it estimates what that volume would have cost at those assumptions; it does not observe your actual time. The result is a per-client monthly report showing the estimated hours and labour equivalent.

You can:

• View any client's ROI report at /bookkeeper/clients/<client-id>/roi.
• Send the report to the client by email — branded, plain language, ready to share.
• See the firm-level rollup on the Command Center.

Use it as an estimate of automated volume, and describe it to clients as an estimate rather than a measured saving. Available on Pro and above; firm rollup on Business.

The Bookkeeper Command Center

/bookkeeper is the firm operator's home page. It's an 8-region composition:

1. Page header — your firm name, quick actions.
2. Hero headline — the single most important number for the day (e.g., "8 of 42 clients close-ready" or "12 anomalies need your attention").
3. KPI strip — the automation estimate, clients close-ready, anomalies pending — at a glance. The hours and labour figures are modelled estimates, not measured savings (see below).
4. Top blockers (when relevant) — the patterns that are gating the most clients from closing.
5. Tax season nudge (Nov–Feb) — 1099 generation reminders.
6. Pending invites — team members or clients with outstanding invitations.
7. Client roster — sortable, filterable list of all your clients with their status.
8. Practice insights — firm-level patterns (Business plans).

The model in plain terms

• Workspace — your firm. One per firm. Holds your team and your client list.
• Client — a separate client workspace for each business you serve. Each client has its own documents, its own books, its own connections.
• Team member — a user inside your workspace. Has a workspace role (owner, admin, member) and can be assigned to specific clients.
• Assignment — links a team member to a client with an access level (view, review, or full).

A firm with 20 clients has 1 firm workspace + 20 client workspaces + however-many team members are assigned across them.

Try Tally on your own firm first

Before inviting real clients, you can provision your firm as its own demo client workspace. From the Command Center empty state, click Set up my firm. Tally creates a workspace for your firm with scoped paid features unlocked (bank, QBO, autonomy, business memory, suggestions) so you can try the full workflow on your own books.

Things to know about firm-self-demo:

• The demo workspace is the only one with these features unlocked — your real clients use the plan tier they're paying for.
• Doc quota stays at the Free tier (300/month) on the demo workspace — it's a demo, not unlimited free Tally.
• Some Pro/Business features (Inbox, 1099 season, cash forecast, firm memory) stay gated even on the demo workspace — those need real production data and external setup. Alerts are not among them: alerts are included on every plan.
• You can't have more than one firm-self demo per bookkeeper across all your workspaces.

Once you're comfortable, you onboard real clients normally. The demo workspace stays around for you to keep testing on.

What's next

• Plans and billing — what's covered at each tier
• How Tally learns — firm memory boundaries
• Connect QuickBooks — per-client QBO connections
• Security and privacy — bookkeeper-client boundaries

What you'll do

• Understand the workspace / client / team / assignment model.
• Create your firm workspace and add team members.
• Add clients (with the right billing model) and assign team members.
• Use the Bookkeeper Command Center to prioritize work across the portfolio.
• Get familiar with close readiness, ROI reports, and firm memory (Business plans).
• Optionally try Tally on your own books first via the firm-self-client demo flow.