Tally decisions and authority

Authority is the difference between "Tally found something" and "Tally can handle it." Tally should do assigned work through LedgerHQ's guarded services and report afterward. She should interrupt only when a real decision or hard stop is needed before books change or something leaves the firm.

Authority settings define what Tally may do herself. Decision cards are the visible interrupts where a person gives a concrete go-ahead, skips an item, or answers the missing question Tally needs to keep working.

What Authority Controls

Authority tells Tally how much freedom it has for a duty or action type. A firm can let Tally watch, suggest, or perform safe supported work automatically. Some actions always stay behind a hard floor because they are destructive, externally visible, billing-related, integration-changing, sensitive, or too broad to execute without an explicit decision.

Examples of work that should usually require clear user intent include:

• disconnecting or changing bank integrations;
• sending client-visible requests or reports;
• finishing a reconciliation with a non-zero difference;
• closing or reopening a month-end close;
• voiding, unposting, unreconciling, restoring, or deleting records;
• changing billing or provider settings;
• bulk recoding a large selection.

Destructive operations also have a bounded mutation budget. A pending request is not the same as a human approval, and an approved one-time override is consumed when the protected action runs. Tally should not reuse one approval for a later destructive action.

Decision Points

A decision point appears only when Tally cannot safely continue on her own. It should show what she needs, why she needs it, which company or record is affected, and what evidence supports the decision.

Some decisions allow item-level skips. That lets a user tell Tally to handle the clear items and hold out the one that does not look right. Tally should learn from skipped work when the workflow supports memory, especially for reconciliation worksheets and repeated classification decisions.

Do, Skip, Or Ask

Use Do it or say go when Tally should continue. Use Skip when the whole decision should not run. Skip one included item when the rest is right but one line should be held out.

If the decision is not clear enough, ask Tally for more evidence before telling her to continue. Good follow-up questions include:

• "Which rows will this affect?"
• "Why did you choose this account?"
• "What statement or report supports this?"
• "What happens if I skip this one item?"

Audit Trail

Hard-stop decisions, skipped items, and resulting work should leave an audit trail. That trail is important for support and for future Tally behavior. A user should be able to distinguish a decision point from completed work.

If Tally appears to have acted outside the authority the firm expected, open Activity and inspect the job or action record. If the evidence still does not make sense, create a support ticket with the company, date, job/action, and the specific result that seems wrong.

For an active safety concern, use Pause Tally from the Tally options menu. An authorized banking manager can resume it after the firm understands the issue. Report a problem can create the support record and pause Tally in one flow.