It is unclear whether an invoice is paid

Two systems disagree about one invoice

Your accounting system shows an invoice as paid and Lithi shows something else, or a hosted payment action closed and you cannot tell what happened.

Partway through settlement this is normal. Leaving it unresolved is not, and neither is paying again to find out.

Read all five states, not one

Compute tracks five separate commercial state machines. Each answers a different question, and only the fifth tells you whether the two sides agree.

• Invoice state: has Lithi finalized the invoice.
• Finance system sync state: has the invoice reached your own finance system.
• Finance system approval state: has your finance system approved it internally.
• Payment state: has the payment been initiated and confirmed at the bank.
• Reconciliation state: do the Lithi record and the external record agree.

The milestones to look for are INVOICE_FINALIZED, ERP_CREATED, ERP_APPROVED, PAYMENT_INITIATED and MERCURY_FUNDS_CONFIRMED.

Only a current bank read-back advances the Lithi payment projection to paid.

Then do this

• Your finance system says Paid and Lithi does not. That label is an annotation inside your system, not settlement. Run reconciliation and read its result before doing anything else.
• The hosted payment action expired or was revoked. Open a fresh one. Its states are unavailable, ready, opened, expired and revoked.
• The outcome is genuinely unknown. Reconcile first. Ask for the current payment status, let reconciliation report, and only then decide.

Lithi holds no debit operation. Every payment is completed by you, through a hosted payment action you open yourself.

What not to repeat

Never retry a payment because a status looks stale. A second payment against an unreconciled invoice is real money moved twice, and recovering it is slower than waiting.

Never infer settled funds from a label in another system. An approval in your finance system is a decision, not a transfer.

Get help safely

Send the invoice reference, the request ID, and the operation name. Add your client version, the contract release, the five states you observed, and the time with its time zone.

Never send bank account numbers, card numbers, a payment credential, a signed payment link, or any payload.

Read more about payment states and paying an invoice.