1. Watching
"Tally is establishing a baseline for this vendor. You decide; Tally listens."
This is where every vendor starts. Tally has either never seen this vendor before, or has seen too few documents to have an opinion. She extracts the data, but she has no recommendation, no autonomy, no auto-fill. Every document is yours to decide.
What you see:
- The Watching dot is filled in (current stage). Recommending, Acting with guardrails, and Autonomous are still hollow.
- A short note underneath the stepper: "2 of 5 reviews until baseline."
- No suggestion box. The document waits for your manual review.
What Tally is doing in the background:
- Counting reviews — approve, correct, reject — and learning what's normal for this vendor (typical amount, typical category, typical reviewer).
- Checking for anomalies, but not flagging anything yet because she has no baseline to compare against.
- Building the trust track record that unlocks the next stage.
Example. A new SaaS vendor — Mosaic Reporting — sends its first invoice. Tally extracts $379, dated last Tuesday. The stepper says Watching · 1 of 5 reviews until baseline. You approve. Five reviews later (or however many your firm requires), Tally graduates Mosaic to Recommending.
2. Recommending
"Tally proposes the right answer. You confirm with one click."
Tally has now seen enough of this vendor to have an opinion. She extracts the document, picks the category and amount she's confident about, and tees up a one-click confirmation. You're still in the loop on every document — but the click is now "yes, that's right" instead of "let me figure this out."
What you see:
- Watching is solid (completed). Recommending is the current stage. Acting and Autonomous are still hollow.
- Microcopy: "Reviewed 7 of 10 toward auto-review." (Each firm's threshold can vary; the count is what's specific to your workspace.)
- A suggestion box: "Tally suggests approving — based on 7 prior reviews."
Examples of what Tally pre-fills at this stage:
- Vendor: Mosaic Reporting (matched against a previously-seen entity, even if the spelling is slightly different).
- Category: Software subscriptions (because that's what you picked the last 6 times).
- GL account: 6500 — Software (mirrored from your previous bookkeeping).
- Anomaly status: clean (amount within typical range, no missing fields).
What you do. Glance, confirm, move on. Or correct if Tally got it wrong — every correction is a teaching signal that sharpens her recommendations going forward.
3. Acting with guardrails
"Tally is ready to auto-act on routine documents. Final checks happen now."
The vendor has crossed the threshold of consistent reviews + high approval rate. Tally is now eligible to auto-process clean documents from this vendor. She isn't yet — there's a final pass where Tally double-checks her recent track record, the document's anomaly profile, and any guardrail conditions (amount caps, date checks, missing-field gates) — but the next clean document from this vendor will move through Tally's hands rather than yours.
What you see:
- Watching and Recommending are both solid. Acting with guardrails is the current stage. Autonomous is still hollow.
- Microcopy: "Eligible — final checks."
- The document still surfaces for review one or two more times, with a note that Tally is auto-approval-ready and is verifying the last few patterns.
What "guardrails" means. Even after a vendor reaches this stage, certain conditions still pause auto-approval and route the document back to you:
- Amount above your configured cap.
- Suspected duplicate.
- Anomaly above your firm's tolerance (sudden 10× spike, missing required field, vendor shape changed).
- Tally's recent confidence on this vendor dropped below the maintenance floor.
These per-document holds aren't regressions of the vendor's stage — Tally is still Autonomous (or eligible), the vendor still moves toward auto-approval — this document just needs a human eye.
4. Autonomous
"Auto-review active for clean documents; exceptions still come back to you."
Tally is now auto-processing routine documents from this vendor. You see them after Tally has reviewed them, with full transparency about what she did and why. If anything is off — anomaly, missing field, amount out of range, vendor pattern shift — the document still surfaces for your review. Tally never silently approves an exception.
What you see:
- All four stages are solid (completed) — Autonomous is the current state.
- Microcopy: "Auto-review active for clean documents; exceptions still come back to you."
- Auto-approved documents render with an "Approved automatically" hero card and a full audit trail (decision ID, factors, confidence, model, timestamp).
- An "Autonomy details" expandable that opens to show the per-document decision reasoning — what level Tally was at, what factors she considered, what confidence she had.
What you do. Review the exceptions when they show up — usually a small fraction of the volume. Spot-check the auto-approved documents at whatever cadence your firm requires (the audit trail is preserved indefinitely for replay). The bulk of the routine work no longer needs your attention.
Common issues
- My new vendor is stuck in Watching. That's the design. Tally needs live human reviews — usually a small handful — before she has enough signal to recommend. Imports alone don't graduate vendors. After a few approvals, she'll move to Recommending automatically.
- Tally was at Acting with guardrails and now she's holding this document. Side state, not regression. Open the tongue at the bottom of the section — it'll say "possible duplicate," "anomaly detected," "amount above cap," or similar. Resolve the per-document concern; the vendor's stage doesn't change.
- I paused autonomy for a vendor and now Tally is in Recommending again. Paused vendors fall back to a manual-review render that displays the stage Tally would otherwise be at. The vendor's earned stage doesn't reset — when you unpause, she resumes from where she was.
- Different reviewers on my team see different stages. Stage is per vendor, not per reviewer. If you and your colleague see different stages for the same vendor, it's almost always because you're looking at different vendors (similar names, slightly different spellings — see the vendor-merge prompt). Inside one canonical vendor, the stage is single-source-of-truth.
- The indicator doesn't show on a document. That's correct for two cases: (1) brand-new vendor with zero prior reviews — Tally hides the indicator until there's enough signal to be useful; (2) the document is from a non-financials pack that doesn't use the autonomy journey.
How Tally moves between stages
Two things must be true for Tally to graduate a vendor to the next stage:
- Track record on that vendor passes a threshold. Consistent approvals, low correction rate, low anomaly rate, no recent calibration drift between reviewers. The exact thresholds are pilot-safe defaults — Tally errs on the side of staying humble until she's earned the next level.
- Live human reviews accumulate. Imports give Tally context (she recognizes who the vendor is, what amounts are typical, what categories you tend to use), but they don't graduate vendors on their own. Live human reviews — approves, corrections, rejections — are what build the authority track record.
The bar is "Tally never acts without permission you've granted by reviewing." Even a deeply-imported vendor with 200 prior invoices starts at Watching for live-review-count purposes.
How to read the journey at a glance
The whole point of the indicator is that it's a one-glance signal — you should know where a vendor is before you finish reading the document title.
- One solid dot, three hollow dots: new vendor, manual review every time. Treat it like any new vendor onboarding.
- Two solid, two hollow: Tally is recommending. Glance at the suggestion, confirm or correct.
- Three solid, one hollow: Tally is on the cusp of auto-approval. Reviews now matter most — they're what graduate the vendor.
- Four solid: Tally is auto-approving. Documents you see at this stage are exceptions or audits. The bulk has already moved.
- A red tongue under the indicator: the strongest signal — your pack's auto-approval has been turned off at the workspace level. Every vendor in the pack is affected. Read the message; expect to manually approve until the pack is re-enabled.
- An amber tongue: something needs attention but it's recoverable. Either the vendor is paused/disabled (still earns reviews, just no auto-approval) or this specific document tripped a guardrail (suspected duplicate, anomaly, missing field). Read the message to know which.
- No tongue at all: Tally has nothing specific to add about this document. Use the top Approve/Reject buttons when you've finished reviewing the fields.
The indicator is the same on the bookkeeper drilldown and the SMB owner's portal — the vendor sits at the same stage regardless of who's looking, because the journey is about the vendor's track record, not the viewer's role.
Side states: paused, disabled, pack-disabled, held-for-document
Side states are NOT stages. The vendor still sits at whichever stage their track record earned. The side state explains why Tally is choosing not to act on this particular document right now.
- Paused. You (or your bookkeeper, or the firm partner) explicitly paused autonomy for this vendor. Reviews still teach Tally; auto-approval is suspended until you unpause. Tally narrates this in her tongue: "Autonomy paused for this vendor — manual review required."
- Disabled. Auto-approval was turned off entirely for this vendor. Stronger than paused — the vendor stays at the stage their track record earned, but Tally won't act regardless of how clean future documents are. Tally narrates: "Autonomy disabled for this vendor — manual review required."
- Pack-disabled. Your workspace administrator turned off auto-approval at the pack level (e.g., for the entire financials pack). Affects every vendor in the pack until re-enabled. Tally narrates: "Auto-approval disabled for this pack — manual review required."
- Held for this document. The vendor is still Autonomous — Tally would auto-approve a clean document — but THIS specific document tripped a guardrail (suspected duplicate, anomaly, missing field, amount over cap). Tally narrates the specific reason: "Possible duplicate detected — review before approving."
In each case, Tally's tongue (the inline voice at the bottom of the document's TALLY'S INSIGHTS section) carries the explanation in plain language. Red is reserved for pack-level shutdowns ("Auto-approval disabled for this pack") because those affect every vendor at once. Vendor-level pauses and per-document holds are amber — they need attention but they're not failures, and reading them as the same severity as a pack shutdown would train you to ignore the strongest signal.
The four stages
Every vendor sits at exactly one of four stages at any time:
What's next
- How Tally Learns — the imports-vs-live-reviews distinction that drives the journey.
- Documents — review and approve — the day-to-day review flow the journey informs.
- Resolution Playbooks — how Tally remembers how similar issues were resolved before.
- Plans and billing — which features are at which tier (the journey indicator is available on Pro+ alongside autonomy).
What you'll learn
- The four stages — what each one means and what Tally is doing at that stage.
- How Tally moves between stages.
- What you see for each stage and what your next action looks like.
- How side states (paused vendors, blocked documents, pack-disabled) are different from journey stages.
- How to interpret the journey at a glance during a review.