Troubleshooting Duplicate Payments

Most vendor invoices get paid exactly once. But every so often, the same bill sneaks in twice — a re-issued invoice, a re-entered order — and with nothing watching, you'd pay it a second time. Here's how ShelfSpace catches a duplicate before a single dollar goes out.

This is your deliveries dashboard — every vendor order on its way to getting paid. And right at the top, in amber, ShelfSpace is waving a flag: one possible duplicate needs your review. It spotted two deliveries that look like the very same charge — and it caught them before either one got paid.

Here's the catch itself: the same vendor, Verdant Hill, and the same two-hundred-and-forty-two-dollar amount, showing up on a second unpaid delivery. That's the kind of thing that's easy to miss at the end of a long week — and expensive if it slips through. So let's open it up.

Click Review, and ShelfiQ pulls both deliveries up side by side and does the comparison for you — reading the vendor, the amount, the invoice numbers, and the dates to work out which one is the genuine order and which one is the copy.

And here's what it found. Two deliveries from the same vendor, the same two-forty-two, the very same products — just billed under two different invoice numbers. One is the real order; the other, marked here, is the duplicate. Neither has been paid yet — so nothing's lost, as long as you only ever pay one of them.

And ShelfiQ doesn't leave you guessing which is which. In plain English, it tells you to keep the genuine record and remove the duplicate — and it spells out exactly why that's safe: there's no payment attached to the copy, so removing it can't strand anything.

So you approve the fix. One click, and ShelfSpace removes the duplicate delivery and clears the flag — that invoice can't be paid a second time now. And be clear about what just happened here: nothing was paid, nothing was refunded, no money moved. Removing the duplicate simply means the second payment never gets created in the first place.

And that's it — the amber flag is gone from your queue, the duplicate is removed, and this invoice can only be paid once. Down here, ShelfSpace keeps a running count of every double-billing it's stopped for you, and the money that stayed in your account because of it. That's how you troubleshoot a duplicate payment in ShelfSpace — you catch it, and you clear it, before a dollar ever goes out the door.