A jurisdiction approves purchases, signs contracts, and commits funds across a dozen departments and a handful of special districts, each within a limit the council or board set by resolution and can change at the next meeting. Approval authority, signature authority, and the appropriation behind any obligation are not the same, and rarely sit with one person. The result is no single, current answer to one question: who is authorized to approve, sign, and commit on behalf of this jurisdiction today, and within what limit? Aptly holds that answer as one live, current record, ready the moment an auditor or public-records request asks.
Delegation of authority (DOA), sometimes called delegated financial authority, is the formal structure that defines who can approve, sign, and commit on behalf of a jurisdiction, up to what limit, and under what conditions. Delegated financial authority covers spend limits alone; a DOA also governs signature authority and non-financial decision rights. In state and local government, that structure has to hold across every department, every special district, and every appropriation the governing body sets by resolution. The authority is set by resolution, and current nowhere. Local government documents its authority as carefully as any industry: charters, the ordinances and resolutions that set the manager's purchasing limits, written purchasing policies, p-card limits, and signature authorizations. The problem is not that the authority is undefined. The problem is that it lives across resolutions adopted on different dates, departmental practice, and static signature cards, held by different offices, impossible to see as one current picture when it matters, and the body can change any of it at the next meeting. In more than a quarter of organizations (28%), the delegation of authority does not address who is permitted to sign at all.
Approval authority, signature authority, and the appropriation get conflated. Holding a budget line, or the ability to initiate a purchase, is not the authority to bind the jurisdiction to an agreement, and an obligation made before funds are appropriated is itself a finding. People act on the wrong one, and the jurisdiction discovers it during an audit rather than before a signature.
Only certain officials can bind the jurisdiction, up to limits the body set, and those limits move. A department that issues a purchase order or signs a contract above the manager's resolution-set threshold has committed the jurisdiction without authority. The body can also change that threshold at any meeting, so last year's limit may no longer hold, and the static record rarely keeps up.
The picture is public, and reconstructed. When an auditor, a council member, or a public-records request asks who was authorized to approve and sign a given contract on a given date, the answer is assembled by hand from resolutions, signature cards, and email, often long after the fact, and whatever gets produced is itself a public record.
86%
Only 14% of organizations embed delegation of authority within an IT system. The other 86% keep it as a document, most often on the company intranet, where it goes out of date the moment a role changes.A policy on paper is not the same as a live record of who held that authority on a given date. In state and local government, that drift is expensive: a purchase order approved above a department's delegated limit, a grant or contract committed by someone without authority to bind the entity, or a payment or agreement signed by an official the governing body had not authorized, each surfaces in an audit rather than before the commitment is made.
Between who people are and where the money moves. Your identity system governs the door: it knows who someone is and what they can log into. Aptly governs the decision once they are through it. Your enterprise systems, the ERP and financial-management platform, the procurement and p-card systems, the contract and signing tools, are where commitments and payments actually get made. Neither identity nor those systems knows what a person is authorized to approve, sign, or commit on behalf of the jurisdiction, and up to what limit the body set. That authority lives in ordinances and resolutions, outside every system that needs it.
Aptly is the authority layer that sits between the two. It holds the jurisdiction's delegated authority as a live model: who holds approval and signing authority, for what, up to what limit, under what conditions including the appropriation requirement, with each delegation's authorizing ordinance or resolution attached and each recipient's acceptance recorded. Connected to your ERP and financial-management platform and your identity directory, Aptly keeps that authority aligned with reality as the body amends thresholds and as people change, so the office routing an approval and the person about to sign are always working from what the jurisdiction actually authorized.
One source, a defined path
Holds authority by statute and charter. Reserves key matters, delegates the rest by ordinance or resolution.
Receives the body's delegating resolution, then sub-delegates in writing within the limit set.
Scoped purchasing and operating authority within their departments.
Runs competitive solicitation; may delegate signing in writing.
Certifies the appropriation before any obligation is made.
Sign within the thresholds the procurement director delegates in writing.
Binds the jurisdiction, signing against the entity's signatory list once the body has awarded.
Separate legal entities, one model
Four capabilities, one system of record. Built for the finance director, jurisdiction attorney, and internal audit teams accountable for it.
The obligations that make current authority non-negotiable. These obligations do not all sit in one office, and they do not pause between audits. Each one assumes the jurisdiction can show who was authorized to act, and on what date. The effect is that an audit or a records request becomes a lookup rather than a reconstruction: the authority that stood on the obligation date is retrievable in its exact form, with the actor and the prior value on every change. Aptly maps your authority model to what each one requires:
The Public Works Department at Hartwell County needs to buy $420,000 of equipment for an infrastructure project funded in part with IIJA dollars. The Public Works Director approves the operational need, the department budget carries the line, and that approval is recorded. The department prepares to issue the purchase order. In Aptly, the jurisdiction's authority model shows what the director's approval is and is not: it confirms the operational need, but it is not authority to commit the county at that amount.
The following year, a Single Audit asks who was authorized on the dates in question. Aptly recalls exactly who was authorized to approve and sign on the purchase on the dates in question, with the delegating resolution behind it, in one place rather than a reconstruction from resolutions, signature cards, and email.
Use case
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Bring your delegating resolution and the authority your manager, one department, and a special district hold. We will show you the single, current, audit-ready view Aptly produces, using your authority data.
