Why invoices get reviewed line by line, not as a whole
One wrong line item shouldn’t hold an entire invoice hostage — and it shouldn’t get rubber-stamped through because the other nine lines were correct, either.
August 18, 2026 · 4 min read
A ten-line invoice with one short-shipped case creates an awkward choice under an all-or-nothing approval model: hold payment on nine correct lines to argue about one, or approve the whole thing and chase the discrepancy separately, off the record. Neither is good. Vendeal’s AP Clearinghouse reviews an invoice at the line level instead, so the nine correct lines aren’t hostage to the one that isn’t.
What’s live today
Each line on an incoming invoice can be marked approved or held individually by a dealership role with invoice edit/approve access. An invoice only becomes eligible for payment once every one of its lines is marked approved — the Pay action simply isn’t available until that’s true. A held line stays attached to that specific invoice and that specific line, not a separate phone call or email thread nobody else can see.
What’s modeled but not shipped yet
The data model supports a fourth line state beyond open, approved, and held: disputed, for a line with an actual disagreement attached, not just a hold. It’s reachable in the schema today but has no dedicated action in the UI yet — right now, a disputed line is handled as a held one until that action ships. We’d rather say that plainly here than let the word "dispute" imply a workflow that doesn’t exist yet.
For more on how payment status and platform fees interact with this review flow, see The real cost of how you get paid.