Who Actually Signs and Who Only Calls

Why this matters

On managed property, the person who contacts you most has the least authority, and the person who binds the payment obligation may never speak to you at all. That inverse relationship is not an accident of a bad account, it is how the segment is built, and a shop that has not internalized it will collect a stack of yeses that bind nobody.

The cost lands at invoicing. Not as a fight over whether the work was good, which it usually was, but as a slow question with no clean answer: who agreed to this? Everyone in the chain answers honestly, everyone points somewhere else, and the receivable sits while the account decides how much goodwill it wants to spend.

The one question that separates the two

Strip away titles and ask a single question about any person who says go ahead: can this person create a payment obligation for the party that owes me?

Not "does this person know the building." Not "is this person senior." Not "did this person hire me." Those are all true of people with no spending authority whatsoever. A site superintendent may know more about the mechanical room than anyone alive and still be unable to commit a dollar of the owner's money.

Everything below is that question applied.

What actual authority looks like

Four proofs, in descending order of how well they hold up. You want at least one of the first two on file per account before the first order.

A written delegation naming the person and the value. An email or a clause from the manager, or from the owner naming the manager, stating what that individual may approve. This is the strongest and the easiest to get, because you can ask for it in one sentence.

Purchase order issuing power. If a person can generate a PO number that your invoice will be matched against, that power came from somewhere and the accounting system is enforcing it. A PO is authority with a receipt.

A limit stated in the vendor agreement you already signed. Read it. Many management-company agreements specify who may authorize and at what level, and shops routinely sign one and then never consult it.

A consistent history of that person's approvals being honored and paid. This is real evidence, and it is the weakest of the four because it is retrospective. It tells you what happened before, not what the account will do on the order that goes sideways.

What deliberately does not count, and why

This is the part worth memorizing, because every entry here looks like authority in the moment.

The tenant or occupant. They report, they grant physical access, they describe what changed. They cannot define scope and they cannot commit anyone's money, including their own landlord's. A tenant signature on your completion ticket means the work was performed in their presence. It is genuinely useful for that and it is not an approval. Treat a tenant statement that "the landlord already said to replace it" as a lead to verify, never as the verification.

The on-site maintenance technician or building super. The most seductive one. They are competent, they are on your side, they are the person who called you, and they often have real dispatch discretion for small routine items. Discretion to call you is not authority to commit the owner above whatever the manager has delegated. Ask the super directly what they are allowed to approve; most will tell you plainly, and the answer is usually smaller than you assumed.

An assistant or coordinator emailing on the manager's behalf. This one may in fact hold, and that is exactly why it is dangerous. Relaying an approval is not the same as holding one, and a relayed approval is only as good as the instruction behind it, which you cannot see. The fix is not to refuse the email, it is to ask once, at account setup, whether that person may approve independently and to keep the answer.

A single board member of an HOA or condo association. A board acts as a board. An individual director, including the president, usually cannot bind the association on their own, and the governing documents say so. A director's enthusiasm at 8pm about a common-area repair is not a resolution.

A leasing agent, a realtor, or a prospective buyer's inspector. These parties have an interest in the property and no authority over its maintenance budget. During a sale in particular, several people will speak with real confidence about what needs doing.

The outgoing manager during a management transition. Their authority ends on a date, and the date may already have passed without anyone telling you. Treat a transition as a hard stop: every order escalates to confirmed new authority until you have it in writing.

A verbal or text "go ahead" with no scope attached. Even from a person who genuinely holds authority. "Yes do it" approves an unbounded number, which is to say it approves nothing anybody will honor later. Authority plus scope is an approval. Authority alone is a conversation.

Three signatures on one job, three different meanings

Shops collapse these into "we got a signature," and then discover the one they collected is not the one they needed.

Collect all three when the account's process allows it. If you can only get one, get the third, because the first two are evidence and the third is the obligation.

Worked example: auditing an approval chain after the fact

A rooftop unit at a managed commercial-residential mixed building. The order ran 6.5 sold hours. The invoice was disputed. The shop pulled the file and found four marks:

1. A tenant signature on the completion ticket.
2. A text from the on-site super at hour 2: "yes do it."
3. An email from the property manager's coordinator at hour 3: "manager says proceed."
4. An email from the property manager herself, dated at account setup, delegating approval up to 3.0 sold hours per work order.

Run the question against each. The tenant cannot bind the owner, so mark 1 establishes presence only. The super's discretion covers dispatch, not commitment, so mark 2 is not an approval. Mark 3 is a relay whose underlying instruction nobody wrote down; it may hold and it is not something you can rely on in a process. Mark 4 is real authority, and it is bounded at 3.0 sold hours.

So of 6.5 sold hours, 3.0 sit inside documented authority and 3.5 do not. That is 54% of the order with no approval the shop can point to, on a job where the work was correct and the tenant was satisfied.

Two honest observations about that result. The coordinator's email in mark 3 would quite possibly be honored in practice, particularly on an account with a history of the manager standing behind that person's messages. That is a position you argue after a dispute has started, not a process you run a business on. And the shop's real error was not any single mark; it was continuing past hour 3.0 without noticing that hour 3.0 was the boundary. A single call at that point, taking perhaps 10 minutes, would have converted the entire remaining 3.5 hours into authorized work.

Establishing authority once, per account

Ask four questions at setup and store the answers in the account record, not in an inbox:

1. Who may approve work, and up to what value? Get names, not roles, because roles change hands quietly.
2. Who else may approve when that person is unreachable, and does their limit differ?
3. May any of them approve by text, or does approval require email or a work order note? Accounts differ, and the ones that require a written channel will not honor a text no matter who sent it.
4. What happens to authority during a management transition or a property sale? Asking this before it happens gets you a real answer. Asking during gets you silence.

Re-ask question 1 annually and any time you notice a new name on incoming work orders. A new coordinator with no delegation will approve things enthusiastically for months.

The apparent-authority trap

There is a legal doctrine under which a party can be bound by someone who reasonably appeared to be authorized, and shops sometimes lean on it after the fact. Treat it as a fallback argument with genuinely uncertain outcome that depends on the specific facts and the jurisdiction, not as a substitute for asking who signs.

The practical problem with relying on it is not whether you would eventually prevail. It is that the argument itself costs you the account. A manager who has to be told that their coordinator's email binds them will pay it once and route the next portfolio elsewhere.

How to verify you got this right

Pull five recent invoices from one managed account that were paid without friction. For each, name the specific person and the specific document that authorized the amount. If you cannot do it for two of the five, you were paid on goodwill rather than on authority, and goodwill is exactly what is absent on the one order that goes wrong.

Then check the boundary case directly. Search your completed orders for any that exceeded the account's standing limit and find the approval that covered the excess. That is the single highest-yield audit in this article, because an order that stayed inside the limit was never at risk, and an order that crossed it either has a real approval on file or has an exposure you did not know about.

References

• See related: The Three-Party Problem in Property Management Work; How to Set Approval Limits With a Property Manager
• See related: How to Get Approval Before You Do Extra Work; What a Property Manager Needs to Defend a Spend
• See related: Never Do Extra Work on a Verbal (in Documenting Commercial Work to Survive a Payment Dispute)
• Trade-standard practice for delegated purchasing authority and purchase-order matching in property management