How do I handle vendor disputes and payment exceptions?

The routine payables run smoothly now. It is the disputes and the exceptions that bog you down, because they are messy, personal, and never fit the standard flow. That is exactly why they eat your time. They cannot be batched, and each one wants judgment. The trap is treating every exception as brand new and solving it from scratch. Most disputes actually fall into a few types: a price mismatch, a missing approval, a duplicate, a vendor who says they were not paid. Once you see the type, the path is usually clear. The chaos is mostly the lack of a pattern, not the volume. Keep a simple list of the exception types you hit and the steps that resolve each one. Next time one lands, match it to a type and follow the path. You will spend less energy deciding and more just doing, and the exceptions will stop feeling like a wall.