Common issues
- A vendor with lots of history is still at Watching. Imports do not advance a stage. Live human reviews do.
- The vendor is at Acting with guardrails but this document came back to me. A per-document check held it. The message on the document names which one. The vendor's stage has not changed.
- A vendor stopped being handled automatically. Check the reason on the document (a side state above, or recent reviews that went against Tally) and the workspace's plan: automatic approval is on Pro and above.
- Two reviewers see different stages for the same vendor. Almost always two different vendor records with similar names. Inside one vendor record the stage is single-source-of-truth.
- No indicator on a document. Expected for a vendor with no review history yet, and for documents outside the financial document workflow.
Live human reviews are the only thing that advances a stage
A live human review is an approval or a rejection a person recorded on a document; a correction counts when the document is then approved or rejected. The one exception is the rejection of a document flagged as a possible duplicate, below. Rejecting a document flagged as a possible duplicate resolves the copy: it is not counted in the vendor's approval rate, review count or stage, and the decision stays in your activity.
Imported history (CSV, an accounting export, a bulk backfill) gives Tally context: it can recognise the vendor and knows what amounts and categories have appeared before. It contributes nothing to a stage. A vendor with two hundred imported invoices and no live reviews sits at Watching.
Per-document checks run at every stage
Reaching a stage never means a given document is handled automatically. Each document is checked on its own, and any of these routes it back to you:
- A critical field is missing — amount, total, vendor, or a date. Any one of these blocks the document on its own, regardless of the vendor's stage.
- More than one non-critical field is missing.
- The document is a suspected duplicate.
- The document is flagged as an anomaly against this vendor's pattern.
- The amount is above the stage's ceiling ($2,000 at Acting with guardrails, $10,000 at Autonomous).
- Recent reviews on this vendor have gone against Tally, which caps the vendor until the pattern recovers.
Tally's extraction confidence is not one of these checks: a low-confidence read is shown to the person reviewing the document, and it does not hold a document from automatic approval.
A held document is not a regression. The vendor keeps the stage its review history earned; this document needs a person.
Reading the indicator
- One filled dot: Watching — manual review every time.
- Two filled: Recommending — a suggestion to confirm or correct.
- Three filled: Acting with guardrails — eligible for automatic approval within the conditions above.
- Four filled: Autonomous — eligible at the higher ceiling; exceptions still return to you.
- A red message: automatic approval is off for the whole workspace.
- An amber message: the vendor is paused or disabled, or this document tripped a check. The message says which.
The stage is a property of the vendor, so it is the same on the bookkeeper drilldown and in the owner's portal.
Side states: paused, disabled, pack-disabled
Side states are not stages. The vendor keeps the stage it earned; the side state explains why Tally is not acting.
- Paused. Automatic approval is suspended for this vendor. Reviews still accumulate.
- Disabled. Automatic approval is switched off for this vendor entirely.
- Pack-disabled. Automatic approval is switched off for the whole workspace. Every vendor is affected until it is re-enabled.
None of these is a setting you can change yourself. Tally states the reason in plain language on the document. A pack-level shutdown is shown in red because it affects every vendor at once; vendor pauses and per-document holds are amber.
The four stages and their conditions
Every vendor sits at exactly one stage. The stage is derived from the vendor's autonomy level.
| Stage | What Tally does | Conditions required to reach it |
|---|---|---|
| Watching | Extracts the document. Makes no recommendation. Every document is yours to decide. | The starting stage for every vendor. |
| Recommending | Proposes values for you to confirm or correct. You still decide every document. | At least 3 live human reviews on this vendor, and a live-human approval rate of at least 80%. |
| Acting with guardrails | Eligible to auto-approve a document that passes every per-document check, with the decision visible and overridable. | At least 5 live human reviews (a separate minimum that applies to every automatic stage), and at least 10 live human reviews, and a live-human approval rate of at least 90%, and the document's amount at or below $2,000. |
| Autonomous | Eligible to auto-approve at a higher amount ceiling. Exceptions still come back to you. | At least 25 live human reviews, and a live-human approval rate of at least 95%, and the document's amount at or below $10,000. |
The approval rate is computed from live human reviews only. Tally's own automatic approvals are never counted toward the rate or the review count that promotes a vendor — otherwise Tally could promote herself.
What's next
- How Tally learns — why imports and live reviews are treated differently.
- Documents — review and approve — the review flow itself.
- Resolution Playbooks — how past resolutions are surfaced.
- Plans and billing — autonomy is available on Pro and above.
What you'll learn
- The four stages and the exact conditions each one requires.
- What live human reviews are, and why imports do not count.
- The per-document checks that can hold a document regardless of stage.
- How side states (paused, disabled, pack-disabled) differ from stages.