Common issues
- I imported 200 invoices and Tally still asks me to confirm new ones. That is by design — imports give context, not authority. Only live reviews on that vendor count toward the thresholds above.
- Tally flagged a vendor as new even though I've imported its history. Check the document — most often this means the vendor name is spelled differently in the import vs. the new document. Edit the new document to use the canonical name; Tally will merge them and stop flagging.
- I'm on the Business plan but firm memory isn't suggesting things across clients. Firm memory requires enough recorded reviews of the same pattern before it has anything to offer. Until then each client is reviewed on its own.
Firm-level patterns (Business plans)
If you're a bookkeeper running a firm with multiple clients on the Business plan, some patterns can be shared across your firm only:
- Vendor-to-category mappings your firm has recorded. "Adobe Creative Cloud → Software Subscriptions" — once your firm has recorded that mapping across enough reviews, an Adobe invoice in another of your client workspaces can pre-fill the category.
- Common policy decisions. Where your firm has recorded the same handling for a class of vendor, that pattern is available to the firm's other client workspaces.
This is not cross-client data sharing. Firm memory is patterns extracted from your firm's review behavior — not raw documents, amounts, or financial data. The actual numbers, attachments, and notes for one client are never visible inside another client.
How Tally earns more autonomy
Tally has four autonomy levels per vendor, each with explicit conditions:
- Manual. You decide every document. The starting level for every vendor.
- Suggest. Tally proposes values for you to confirm or correct. Requires at least 3 live human reviews on that vendor and a live-human approval rate of at least 80%.
- Auto with Review. Eligible to approve a document automatically, with the decision visible and overridable. Requires at least 5 live human reviews (a separate minimum that applies to every automatic level), at least 10 live human reviews, an approval rate of at least 90%, and a document amount at or below $2,000.
- Fully Auto. Eligible at a higher ceiling. Requires at least 25 live human reviews, an approval rate of at least 95%, and a document amount at or below $10,000.
These conditions are necessary, not sufficient. Meeting them makes a vendor eligible. Every document is still checked on its own, and a missing critical field, a suspected duplicate, an anomaly, low extraction confidence, an amount above the ceiling, or a recent run of reviews that went against Tally will route that document back to you. Vendor Autonomy Journey lists the checks.
The approval rate counts live human reviews only. Tally's own automatic approvals never count toward promoting a vendor — otherwise she would be promoting herself.
You can pause or disable autonomy per vendor, or for the whole workspace, at any time.
Imports give Tally context. Live reviews give Tally authority.
When you import history — a CSV from QuickBooks, a Xero export, a year of bank transactions — Tally absorbs that data fast. She learns who your vendors are, what amounts are typical, what categories you usually pick. That's context. It's why a freshly-imported workspace doesn't show every vendor as "new" — Tally already recognizes them.
But context isn't the same as authority. Tally won't auto-approve a vendor just because that vendor appeared 200 times in your import. Imports tell her who exists; they don't tell her how you actually want each one handled going forward. To earn that, she needs to watch you make real decisions inside the product.
The distinction has a practical consequence: an import never unlocks automatic handling. Live reviews on that specific vendor are the only thing that advances it. The exact conditions are in Vendor Autonomy Journey.
It's a deliberate balance: giving Tally a head start from your history, while protecting you from a system that confidently does the wrong thing because of bad imported data.
The boundaries
Three lines Tally never crosses:
- No cross-client document data. Two clients in the same firm don't see each other's documents, vendors, or numbers — ever. The bookkeeper sees both because they're assigned to both; Tally never blurs the boundary.
- No cross-firm anything. Patterns Tally learns inside one firm stay inside that firm. They never seed a different firm's defaults.
- No autonomy without consent. Imports don't unlock autonomy. Auto-approve happens only after live human reviews build the track record.
You stay in control of these boundaries through plan tier and access settings — but the boundaries themselves are baked into how Tally works, not just config you have to remember to set.
What's next
- Documents — review and approve
- Vendor Autonomy Journey — the visible four-stage indicator that shows where each vendor sits today
- Bookkeeper workspace — close readiness, ROI reports, firm memory
- Intelligence Digests — the recurring email summary of what Tally handled
- Resolution Playbooks — how Tally surfaces patterns from your past decisions
- Missing Document Detection — when expected recurring documents haven't arrived
- Plans and billing — which features are at which tier
- Security and privacy — the boundaries explained more fully
What Tally remembers per vendor
For every vendor she's seen, Tally tracks:
- Provenance. How many documents Tally has seen from this vendor — broken into "from imports" (historical context) and live reviews (your decisions).
- Typical amount. What's normal for this vendor — average, range, frequency.
- Typical category and account. Which category you usually pick, which GL account you usually map to.
- Approval pattern. When you approve vs. correct vs. reject.
- Anomaly history. When a document fell outside the normal range and what you did with it.
- Open questions. Anything still unresolved (missing W-9, pending follow-up).
You can see this on the Memory page for any vendor. Tally surfaces "47 documents from imports + 12 from live reviews" as separate signals so you know what's grounding her judgment.
What you'll learn
- The difference between imported context and live review authority.
- What Tally remembers about each of your vendors.
- How Tally earns more autonomy over time.
- What's per-business and what (for firms) can be firm-level.
- The boundaries that prevent cross-client leakage.