Vendor Central Invoices: Submission, Rejections, Holds, and Getting Paid on Time

The invoice that never paid

A PO shipped weeks ago, the due date has come and gone, and no remittance names it. Somewhere between your system and Amazon's the invoice stalled, and Vendor Central will tell you where, but only if you know which screen to open and how to read the status on it.

On Vendor Central, payment starts with you. After a shipment goes out, you or your EDI provider send an invoice, and that invoice is what requests payment. Amazon checks it against the purchase order and the Advance Ship Notice before any money moves, so a shipment with no invoice behind it doesn't get paid. This guide follows one invoice from submission to payment: how it gets to Amazon, what Amazon compares it against, why it gets rejected or held, how payment terms and Quick Pay change what lands and when, and where to watch its status.

A note on sourcing: Amazon's own invoicing help sits behind the Vendor Central login, so the mechanics below come from integrator and practitioner guides that agree with each other. Check the labels against your own account before you write them into a process, since menus can vary by region and account type.

How invoices reach Amazon: EDI 810 or manual entry

How your invoices reach Amazon depends on how the rest of your order traffic moves.

1. EDI. The invoice travels as the EDI 810, alongside the 850 purchase order, the 855 acknowledgment, and the 856 ASN. According to SalesDuo, an 810 carries the invoice number and date, the PO reference, item IDs, shipped and invoiced quantities, unit prices and discounts, taxes, and terms, and Amazon validates it automatically. The Amazon EDI guide covers what the integration costs and what a late or wrong document costs you, so this piece stays on the invoice itself.
2. Manual entry in Vendor Central. Boldvan notes that portal-based methods exist for small-volume suppliers, and that EDI becomes a requirement as order complexity and volume grow, because keying invoices by hand at scale leads to missed deadlines, unmanageable manual work, and chargebacks.

Whichever path you use, the invoice lands in the same place in Vendor Central: Payments, then Invoices.

What Amazon checks before it pays: the three-way match

Amazon pays an invoice once its lines agree with the purchase order Amazon issued and the shipment you declared against it. Integrators call this the three-way match between the 850 PO, the 856 ASN, and the 810 invoice. In Boldvan's description, Amazon matches invoice details against the associated POs and ASNs, and discrepancies in pricing, quantities, or allowances often cause rejections or delayed payment. SalesDuo adds item IDs to that list.

That gives you three things to check on every line:

• Quantity. What you invoice has to agree with what the ASN declared and what the PO asked for. SalesDuo singles out ASN-to-invoice quantity mismatches as a cause of stalled auto-matching.
• Price and allowances. The unit cost on the invoice has to match what Amazon has on the PO for that item, including any discount or allowance your terms apply.
• Item identifiers. Each invoice line has to name the same item the PO line named.

Since the match can only be as clean as the documents feeding it, the ASN and the purchase order are the first places to look when an invoice fails.

Why invoices get rejected, and the fix for each

A rejected invoice is one Amazon did not process because information on it was missing or incorrect, so nothing pays until you fix it and send it again.

On EDI, read the 997 first. Boldvan describes the 997 functional acknowledgment as the first line of defense for error tracking, because it records which EDI files Amazon received and whether their format was valid. If the 997 for an 810 is missing or flags a format problem, start there, since Amazon may never have read the invoice at all.

Then work the rejection by cause:

1. Quantity mismatch. Pull the ASN for the shipment and the PO it was built against. Invoice what the ASN declared and what the PO confirmed, line by line, and resubmit. If the ASN itself was wrong, fix that process at the warehouse as well, or the same error will hit the next invoice.
2. Price or allowance mismatch. Compare your invoice unit cost against the cost on the PO. Boldvan's advice is to realign your internal master data and integration maps whenever Amazon changes terms or SKU definitions, because a cost change that never reached your ERP will reject every invoice carrying the old price.
3. Item identifier mismatch. Check that each invoice line names the item on the matching PO line, and correct the mapping in your ERP or EDI platform so the next invoice goes out right.
4. Missing or incorrect fields. The rejection detail tells you which field is wrong and how to correct it.

To resubmit:

1. Open Payments, then Invoices.
2. Find the rejected invoice and open its Details. Amalytix reports that Details shows the rejection reason, the rejection date, and specific instructions for correcting the invoice.
3. From Available Actions, choose "Fix and resubmit invoice".
4. Correct the fields the Details named and submit.

Paper invoices take a different route. Amalytix says those corrections go through Contact Us, then Accounting, then "Where's my payment?", where you attach the corrected version.

Invoice holds and rejections are different problems

"On Hold Due to Matching Issue" is a separate status from Rejected. A held invoice hasn't been thrown back to you; it's waiting on invoice matching, and payment follows once the match resolves. When one sits there longer than you'd expect, go back to the PO and ASN behind it and look for the line that disagrees with the invoice, using the same three checks as above.

Payment terms and the Quick Pay trade-off

Even a clean invoice pays on a schedule, and your terms set that schedule. Amalytix notes that due dates are calculated from the invoice date or the receipt date, and that freight terms affect the timeline.

According to SPS Commerce:

• NET terms count from the invoice date. On 30 NET, Amazon has 30 days from the invoice date to pay.
• EOM terms count from the end of the month in which the invoice was received, plus the stated number of days.
• Longer terms are the trend, with Amazon pushing for 60, 90, or even 120 days after an invoice is issued.

Quick Pay Discount (QPD) is Amazon's offer to pay sooner in exchange for a deduction, typically 1% to 3% of the invoice. SPS gives the example of a supplier on 30 NET with a 3% QPD who may be paid in 15 days, minus 3% of the invoice.

What makes Quick Pay expensive is the order the deductions come in. SPS reports that Amazon takes the QPD first, before inventory receipt is verified, and if a shortage claim follows, that deduction comes off a later payment as well. In their worked example, a NET 60 supplier waited 64 days and collected 93% of the invoice after repeated QPD and shortage deductions. So before you accept or renegotiate Quick Pay, model it against your shortage rate as well as your margin, because both deductions land on the same invoice.

Tracking invoice status

Open Payments, then Invoices. Amalytix groups the statuses you'll see like this:

• In progress, no action needed: Submitted (wait unless Amazon contacts you), In Review (issues detected that may need your input), Processing Proof of Delivery, Processing Credit Memo.
• Action required: Incomplete, Rejected, Credit Memo Required, Proof of Delivery Required, Proof of Delivery Rejected.
• Resolution: Queued for Payment, Paid (Last 3 Months), On Hold Due to Matching Issue, Cancelled.

Work the action-required group first, since nothing there moves until you do. Then sweep On Hold Due to Matching Issue, because it sits in the resolution group next to Paid and is easy to skim past. Once an invoice reads Paid, the payment and any deductions taken against it show up on the remittance, and a short payment becomes a dispute question. The chargeback dispute guide and the shortage claim dispute guide pick up from there.

If you came from Seller Central

The invoice is the step to add to your routine. On Vendor Central nothing pays until you invoice, and the invoice has to match a PO and an ASN that Amazon already holds, so the documents you send before the invoice decide whether it pays on time. The Seller Central to Vendor Central guide maps the reports that moved.

What Vendor Central will not give you

Vendor Central shows each invoice's status on one screen and the documents it has to match on others. The PO, the ASN, the invoice, and the remittance that eventually settles it never appear side by side, and the Paid view only reaches back three months. Finding out why one invoice is held means pulling all four by hand, and the next held invoice starts the same search over.

InsightLeap covers the PO side of that match continuously. It keeps product-level Vendor Central PO, sales, and inventory data with history past what Amazon lets you see, and reports fill rate and chargeback states on a fixed schedule, so the PO half of the record you need when an invoice stalls is already pulled. The features page lists what it tracks.

For the invoices themselves, set a weekly pass: clear the action-required statuses, trace every hold older than your normal matching time back to its PO and ASN, and check each Quick Pay invoice against the shortage claims that follow it.