How Tally investigates unknown money
Unidentified deposits and opaque withdrawals get researched, booked when provable, and turned into one clear question when they are not.
What It Tries, In Order
A deposit nobody recognizes is the transaction most likely to sit untouched for months. Tally works those rows deliberately: it identifies what it can prove, asks about what it cannot, and escalates the rest.
Firm memory and prior answers. If this merchant was identified before — for this company or elsewhere in your firm — Tally reuses that answer rather than asking again.
Merchant research. Tally builds a dossier from the descriptor, the history, and the company's chart of accounts.
Recognizable bank activity. A bank charge is coded straight to the company's Bank Fees or Bank Charges account. If the chart has no such account, Tally escalates rather than inventing one.
Probable transfers. A row that looks like money moving between the company's own accounts is handed to pair settlement instead of being categorized. See How Tally settles transfers and card payments.
What Reaches The Company Owner
When research cannot identify a row, Tally drafts one question covering every related row for that merchant — not one question per transaction. A company owner gets a single answerable message instead of a list.
When the owner answers, Tally converts the answer into coding and books the whole group. If the answer cannot be turned into a treatment, that lands in Needs you with the owner's actual words quoted, so you can see what they said and decide.
Reading The Report
| Group | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Done | Identified and coded from memory, research, or a client answer |
| Staged for your click | Ready to post, waiting on you |
| Waiting / hand-offs | A question is out with the owner, or the row went to pair settlement |
| Needs you | Tally could not resolve it and says why |
A clean run says so plainly: every dollar is identified — no unknown deposits or withdrawals past the age gate.
Recent activity is not chased immediately. Rows have to age first, because most unknown money explains itself within a few days once the counterpart arrives.
Your Part
Answer the Needs you lines. They are the rows where a person genuinely knows something the evidence does not contain — an owner draw, a rebate, a legal settlement, a transfer from an account nobody connected.
Do not clear an unknown deposit into a miscellaneous income account to empty the queue. An unexplained deposit coded to the wrong place is harder to find later than one left uncoded, and it can misstate revenue for the period.
If a deposit is large, repeated, or looks like it may not belong to this company at all, leave it unposted and create a support ticket with the company, account, date, amount, and description.
Related
- How Tally codes your bank feed — the broader coding run this fits inside.
- Ask a company owner for an answer or file — how the questions Tally drafts reach the owner and come back.
How Tally settles transfers and card payments
Tally confirms matched pairs, rejects false matches, and chases card payments with no visible funding side.
How Tally watches your bank connections
Tally detects broken and silently stale feeds, chases the reconnect with the company owner, and escalates when the connection cannot be saved.