Here is a 1,200 late fee that neither entity's ledger explains. Entity A charged it; Entity B never paid it; A never reversed it. The reconciliation shows it open for five months. The explanation is a six-message email thread in which A's controller agreed to waive it in March. Nobody told the ledger.
Decisions live in inboxes
Intercompany arrangements between related entities are informal in a way third-party contracts are not. Fees are waived by reply, credits agreed in passing, allocation disputes settled with "fine, split it". These are real decisions by authorised people. They are also invisible to anyone reconciling from the ledgers.
The result is a class of open items that cannot be cleared from the books alone, because the books are not where the decision was recorded.
Reading the thread as a document
Treating correspondence as a source document changes the reconciliation in two ways:
- Extraction. From a thread: who agreed what, how much, when, and whether anyone later disagreed. Quoted history de-duplicated; the final position identified.
- Linkage. The extracted decision is matched to the open item by amount and counterparty, and the thread is cited as evidence — sender, date, message.
The waived fee becomes: 1,200 waived by A (K. Lam, 14 Mar email); not reversed in A's ledger; draft reversal attached. A controller can approve that in thirty seconds. Finding the thread took the agent a few seconds. Finding it by hand took five months, because nobody looked.
Boundaries
An email is evidence of a decision, not a decision in itself if the sender lacked authority — and the agent cannot know who has authority. That is why extracted decisions are presented as explanations with the thread cited, and the entry stays a draft until a person who knows the delegation says yes.
It is also why the correspondence has to be uploaded or forwarded deliberately. TieOut Pilot does not read a mailbox; it reads the threads you give it, for the items you are reconciling.