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Exceptions

An exception is an audit finding — Upwell’s way of flagging that something about an invoice doesn’t line up and a person should look at it. Exceptions are what stand between an invoice and approval: a clean invoice sails through, one with an open exception waits.

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What raises an exception

Every invoice is audited as it’s ingested and matched. On the payables side that means checking a carrier invoice against its bill; on the receivables side it means checking a customer invoice against what’s required to send it. Anything that doesn’t reconcile — a mismatch, a missing document, a failed match — becomes an exception.
Exceptions exist on both sides. Carrier-invoice (AP) exceptions like a total-amount mismatch or a missing POD, and customer-invoice (AR) exceptions like a missing invoice copy or BOL, are both surfaced the same way. The audit rules that generate them are configurable per account, so the exact set an account sees varies.

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The lifecycle

(The Vocabulary page carries this list in its generated form.) An exception moves through a small set of statuses: OPEN and IN_PROGRESS are the two “still needs attention” states — they’re what hold an invoice back. The rest mean the finding is no longer standing in the way.

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Common exceptions

A representative sample of what Upwell flags (not exhaustive — the active set depends on your account’s audit rules):

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How exceptions affect approval

Open and in-progress exceptions are the gate on approval — but the exact rules differ by side: Carrier invoices (AP):
  • Auto-approval skips any carrier invoice with an open or in-progress exception entirely — no override.
  • Manual approval can override open exceptions to approve anyway — with one exception: Carrier Pay Frozen can never be overridden and must be cleared first.
Customer invoices (AR):
  • Approval can likewise proceed over open exceptions with an explicit override, but there’s no Carrier Pay Frozen carve-out (that’s a payables hold). There’s no carrier-invoice-style auto-approval on the AR side.
For the approval paths in full — manual, auto-approval, and the external request-for-approval — see How carrier invoices get approved; for the lifecycle and API signals, see Knowing when a carrier invoice is processed. Over the API, a carrier invoice exposes its open findings as the exceptions field — a comma-joined string (e.g. "INVOICE AMOUNT MISMATCH"), empty when clean.
Don’t judge exceptions until ingestion has run. A brand-new invoice always shows matching findings (“no matching shipment / bill”) that clear on their own once matching completes — see the lifecycle guide.
For how exceptions are surfaced and worked in the app, see Carrier invoice audit. For the objects referenced here, see the data model.