Something on the invoice is wrong. The price doesn't match what was agreed, the quantity doesn't match what arrived, or the whole document belongs to someone else.
The disagreement is usually the easy part. What goes wrong is the handling.
The failure mode
An invoice is queried. Somebody emails the supplier. The invoice comes out of the normal flow while everyone waits.
Then it stops being anywhere. It isn't in the ledger, because it wasn't posted. It isn't on the aged creditors report, because it doesn't exist as a record. It isn't in the approval queue, because it was pulled out. It is in one person's sent items, and it is invisible to every report anybody runs.
Six weeks later the supplier puts the account on stop, and the first anyone hears is a delivery that doesn't arrive.
A disputed invoice must remain a visible record. Everything else in this piece follows from that.
Post it, then mark it
The instinct is not to post an invoice you don't agree with, on the reasonable grounds that it may be wrong.
Post it anyway, and flag it as disputed.
- It appears on the ledger, so it can be reported on
- It appears in creditors, which is where an accrual for a contested liability generally belongs
- It is excluded from payment runs by its status rather than by its absence
- Somebody owns it
If the dispute resolves in your favour, the supplier issues a credit note and the ledger shows both documents, which is exactly what their ledger will show too. Reconciliation works. If you had simply not posted it, the two ledgers disagree and someone has to explain why every month.
The alternative — deleting the invoice and pretending it never arrived — leaves you with no record of a liability that legally still exists.
Establish what kind of dispute it is
The category determines who resolves it, and misrouting is the main cause of delay.
Price. The rate doesn't match what was agreed. Resolved by whoever agreed the price — usually a buyer or a director, rarely finance.
Quantity or delivery. Short delivery, damaged goods, never arrived. Resolved by whoever received it, and it needs the delivery note.
Duplicate. The same charge, already invoiced. Resolved by finance, quickly, with a reference to the original.
Not ours. Wrong customer entirely, or a subsidiary confusion. Resolved by returning it promptly — the supplier has an unpaid invoice they think is yours.
Scope. Work billed that wasn't authorised. The slowest category, because it is really a disagreement about a conversation, and it needs whoever had that conversation.
Administrative. Wrong PO reference, wrong entity name, missing VAT number. Not a real dispute — the amount is agreed and the document needs reissuing. Worth separating from the rest, because these can often be fixed the same day and frequently sit in a queue for weeks alongside genuine disagreements.
Pay what isn't in dispute
If four lines of a five-line invoice are agreed, do not hold the whole document.
Ask the supplier to credit and reissue, or agree in writing to pay part now with the balance on resolution. Both are normal, and both preserve the relationship far better than silence followed by a full payment two months late.
What to avoid is short-paying unilaterally without agreement. The supplier's ledger will show an unexplained shortfall, their credit control will chase it, and you will have an unreconciled difference for as long as the account exists.
Keep the clock running
Disputes drift because nobody owns the waiting.
- Give every disputed invoice an owner — a person, not a department
- Give it a review date, and look at the list on that date
- Record what was asked and when, in a place other than one mailbox
- Escalate on a schedule rather than on frustration
A weekly look at disputed items takes a few minutes and is the control that stops six-week silences. Most businesses that adopt one find items on the list that everybody assumed had been settled.
When it resolves
In your favour: get the credit note. Do not treat a verbal agreement as a credit — post the credit note when it arrives, and allocate it to the invoice it relates to.
In theirs: clear the disputed flag and release it for approval and payment. Note why, in a sentence. The next person to see a similar invoice from that supplier will need it.
Partly: expect a credit note for the disputed portion and pay the rest. Same as above, twice.
Never: at some point a small disputed balance costs more to pursue than it is worth. Write it off deliberately, with a note, rather than letting it sit on the ledger for years. An aged creditors report full of ancient contested pennies is a report nobody trusts.
What good looks like
- Disputed invoices are posted and flagged, never held outside the ledger
- Each has a named owner and a review date
- Undisputed portions are paid on time
- Credit notes are obtained and allocated, not assumed
- The disputed list is reviewed on a schedule and is short
Cribble scores every field it extracts rather than returning one figure for the document, so a value that doesn't look right is flagged before it reaches approval rather than after a supplier queries it. Disputed items stay in the approval queue as visible records rather than disappearing from the process.