# What is a payment mandate?

URL: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/payment-mandate
Markdown twin of that page. Append `.md` to any Orla page URL to get one.

A payment mandate is a written authority, signed by a company's owners, that says which payments may go out by themselves, from which accounts and up to what amount, and which must still wait for a person.

The word has two lives in finance, and they point in opposite directions. A SEPA Direct Debit mandate is the form you sign so that a supplier may pull money from your account: the authority is the creditor's. A payment mandate in the sense here is the company's own authority over the money it pushes out: what part of the company may pay, from which account, how much, and when a person has to look.

A board resolution naming who may sign cheques is an old form of it. The modern one is narrower and more useful: a budget with a name on it. The Tools budget may pay software bills up to $3,000 a month from the operating account; Delivery may pay freelancers up to $18,000 a month; anything past the budget, to a new payee or to changed bank details, waits.

A mandate is what lets software pay without a press and still be accountable. Without one, a tool either asks a person about every payment or pays on whatever it was told last. With one, the question is not whether the machine is trusted but whether the payment is inside the page somebody signed.

#### How this shows up in Orla

In Orla a mandate is one page: positions with a person or an agent on each, a budget per position, the accounts it may pay from, and the signing rules above it. A bill inside its budget pays by itself on its date; past the budget it goes to the position that gave the mandate. Signing rules stand above every mandate, and a new payee, changed bank details or an amount four times the usual always go to a person.

Brakes sit above the mandate too: $2,000 a payment and $10,000 a day on what Orla pays by itself until you change them, and loosening a limit waits 24 to 72 hours. Nothing acts alone on day one: every kind of action runs an [autonomy pilot](https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/autonomy-pilot) first.

#### Related terms

- Signing rule: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/signing-rule
- Autonomy pilot: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/autonomy-pilot
- Accounts payable: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/accounts-payable

#### Read next

- The mandate, page by page: https://www.orla.finance/en/autopilot/mandate
- Every brake above it: https://www.orla.finance/en/security