How Tally codes your bank feed
What Tally researches, codes, posts, and stages on its own each day, and which rows it deliberately leaves for you.
The Order Work Happens In
Most bank-feed rows are coded before you open them. Tally researches the merchants, codes what it can prove, posts ordinary activity it can treat, and leaves special or fenced work in its exact workflow.
A row is handled by the first thing that recognizes it:
- A bank rule codes it, and an active rule posts it.
- AI research checks firm and company history, shared merchant knowledge, and the web for settled rows no rule matched.
- Ordinary posting posts the selected revenue or expense account when the result is at least 60% confident. Lower-confidence ordinary rows stay uncoded in Ready for accountant review.
- Special and fenced workflows keep transfers, card payments, checks in quarantine, fixed assets, debt, tax, owner money, payroll, warnings, pending rows, and locked periods out of ordinary posting.
What survives ordinary coding is either special work or an ordinary row left in Ready for accountant review.
Same-company history carries the most weight. Posted and human-coded rows are eligible evidence. Repeated consistent treatment raises confidence; conflicting treatment lowers it. Excluded rows and unposted AI-coded rows do not reinforce a future decision.
What Tally Posts On Its Own
On a LedgerHQ + Tally firm, ordinary rows finish in one run. After research, each clean ordinary row gets one of these outcomes:
- Best fit — Tally posts the active revenue or expense account selected for that exact row. When it posts, it may also save a narrow bank rule so the same merchant codes itself next time.
- Needs review — when ordinary profit-and-loss treatment stays unresolved or confidence is below 60%, Tally leaves the row uncoded in Ready with its suggestion, confidence, and rationale saved on the row. An accountant can use Ask Client to post an eligible row to Management Review - Income or Management Review - Expense for later recoding. The guided Fast Coding workflow sends these rows to the designated recipient; without one, they stay queued in Ask Client. Ask Client never mints a rule.
- Already coded (
post only) — if the row already has an active account, Tally posts that account as-is without re-researching or replacing it.
Its report says so plainly — for example, "I researched, coded, and posted the $248.00 Verizon charges (3 rows) to Telephone & Internet."
Everything else is held back deliberately:
- Special items — fixed asset, debt, tax, owner, payroll, transfer, or card payment activity. These never post through ordinary residue; they stay in their exact workflow for your call.
- Checks still in quarantine — held until image or accountant clearance.
- Locked-period rows — reported, not touched.
Special-screen items are staged, not skipped. Fixed asset, debt, tax, owner, and payroll rows sit waiting for a person indefinitely if nobody looks at them.
Reading The Row Labels
In Bank Feeds and Fast Coding, a coded row tells you where its account came from:
- Rule coded — an active bank rule applied it.
- Suggested — category research proposed it. Change it freely; a human choice always wins.
- Tally — Tally coded it from researched evidence.
A label tells you the mechanism, not that the answer is right. Review the payee, amount, and account before relying on anything you did not personally research.
When Research Does Not Run
Category research reports why it produced nothing:
- AI did not find any uncoded rows to research — nothing was eligible.
- AI did not find a confident suggestion — the ordinary row stays uncoded in Ready when Tally cannot reach 60% confidence.
- AI suggestion budget is used up for this company this month — the company's bank-feed AI budget is exhausted for the month.
You can always code and post those rows by hand. See Code one bank transaction.
Automatic Posting On Core Firms
AI auto-post is a Core firm setting shown in the Bank Feeds header. When it is on, high-confidence research can post through the normal accounting path; when it is off, those rows wait for you. Active bank rules post independently of that switch. On Tally companies, Tally AI is broader: rule coding/posting and other unattended Tally bookkeeping also wait while it is off.
LedgerHQ + Tally firms use a separate Tally AI switch for the firm workspace and every managed company. When a workspace is off, Tally does not work unattended in those books. When it is on and the firm is not paused, Tally can post ordinary best-fit rows at or above the fixed 60% confidence floor. Lower-confidence ordinary rows stay uncoded in Ready with their saved review assessment until an accountant codes them or uses Ask Client to move an eligible row to Ask Client.
Check The Work
Open Fast Coding > Activity, Ask Client on the Profit & Loss, or the account register to see what posted and from which source. See Review what posted and who posted it.
If something posted incorrectly, use Undo a posted bank transaction and then fix the cause — a posting that came from a rule will repeat until the rule changes. See Stop an overbroad bank rule.
If activity appeared that you cannot account for at all, report an unexpected change to the books before correcting anything.