Billing Dispute & Short-Pay Tracker
Get invoice disputes and short-pays out of email and into one tracker — log the dispute, assign an owner, track it to resolution, and record the outcome only after a manager approves the credit, hold, or write-off.
A logged-in web tool where your AR, collections, and CSR team import disputed invoices from a CSV, log each dispute with a reason, assign an owner, track it to resolution, and record the final outcome — credit, hold, or write-off — only after a manager approves it. Duplicate disputes are blocked, every action is logged, and you can export a clean resolution record as CSV.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A disputed-invoices export (CSV) with reason notes — or a Google Sheet you keep them in
- Optional: a customer / account list (name, email)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
A customer short-pays an invoice. A note lands in someone's inbox: "they're disputing the freight charge." Then it sits. Three weeks later collections chases the balance, the customer is annoyed because "we already told you," and nobody can find who was handling it or what was decided. Multiply that by every short-pay and deduction across your AR book and you have real money quietly leaking — credits that were promised but never issued, write-offs nobody approved, disputes that simply aged out of memory.
The root problem is that disputes live in email and chat. There's no single list, no owner, no clock, and no record of who decided to give that $400 credit. This tool fixes exactly that.
What you'll build
A small, logged-in web app for your AR / collections / CSR team:
- Import disputed invoices from a CSV (or a Google Sheet) — invoice number, customer, amount, amount in dispute, and the reason note.
- One queue of open disputes with an owner, a status, and how long each has been sitting.
- Track each dispute to resolution — notes, status changes, and a proposed outcome (credit, hold, or write-off).
- A manager approval gate: the proposed outcome is only actioned after a manager reviews and approves it. Nothing hits your system of record before a human signs off.
- A clean resolution record you can export as CSV — and, when the outcome is a credit, a handoff to your credit-memo workflow.
It's realistic to build in an afternoon.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
- It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a line of code, the plan has the AI agent ask you about your dispute reasons, your approval limits, your invoice and account naming, your volumes, and your messiest edge cases — then tailors the data model and rules to your shop instead of a generic template. You confirm a short spec, then it builds.
- A step-by-step build, where every step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt.
- The exact data model for disputes, owners, status history, and approvals.
- The duplicate guard (invoice number + dispute ID) so the same dispute can't be logged or resolved twice.
- The manager approval gate, wired so a credit, hold, or write-off can't be recorded until it's approved.
- A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the whole thing today from a CSV or Google Sheet — no integration to your ERP required.
- A CSV resolution export in the columns your accounting system expects.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own disputes.
- A complete audit trail — who logged it, who worked it, who approved the outcome, and when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the tool drafts the resolution; a manager reviews and approves; only then is the outcome recorded.
- Duplicate guards on invoice + dispute ID so nothing gets processed twice.
Who it's for
AR specialists, collections teams, and customer service reps who field short-pays and deductions — and the managers who have to approve the credits, holds, and write-offs at the end of it.
You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.