An invoice moves through several stages between scanning it and being able to receive it. It only appears in Receiving once it reaches the stage called To Receive. If it is not there, it is almost always sitting at an earlier stage or it failed on the way.
Check the invoice's status first. That single piece of information tells you which of the sections below applies. If you want to see what the process looks like when it is working, Receiving via the Santé invoice scanner walks through the normal flow end to end.
What the statuses mean
Status | What it means | What to do |
Processing | The invoice is still being read | Wait. Do not re-upload |
Failed | Reading the invoice did not complete | Re-upload it. See below |
To Receive | Ready for you to review and receive | This is where it appears in Receiving |
Bill Hold | Received but held for billing | Normal, no action needed |
Received | Fully received into inventory | Done |
The most common cause: the upload was interrupted
When you upload an invoice, Santé reads the document while you wait. The screen shows "Processing invoice... Do not close." during this.
That message is literal. If the tab is closed, the browser is refreshed, or the computer sleeps before it finishes, the invoice never reaches To Receive and will not appear in Receiving.
If a staff member uploaded an invoice and then navigated away, that is very likely what happened. Upload it again and leave the tab alone until it finishes.
If the invoice failed
Re-uploading is the right first move, and it works often enough to try before anything else. If it fails a second time, the document itself is usually the problem.
Things that cause a failure:
The file is not a PDF. Santé accepts a single PDF. A photo, a JPG, or a Word document will not process. See Uploading a PDF of your invoice for the upload itself.
Multiple invoices in one file. One upload should be one invoice. A stack of different invoices scanned into a single PDF will not split itself apart.
The scan quality is too low. Faint, skewed, or very dark scans cannot be read reliably. Rescan at a higher quality setting.
The scan is cut off. If the scanner only captured the top page of a multi page invoice, the rest of the data is genuinely not in the file.
If the invoice never left the scanner
Before blaming Santé, confirm the scan actually produced a file.
Most stores use an Epson scanner that sends documents to the cloud, and Santé picks them up from there. If the scanner did not complete its upload, there is nothing for Santé to process and nothing will appear at any status.
Check in this order:
Does the scanner show the scan completed successfully, with no jam or error?
Is the scanner still connected to Wi-Fi? A changed Wi-Fi password is a common cause, and the scanner will not tell you until you try to scan.
Is the scanner still registered to your Epson account? If it was reset, it needs to be registered again before scan to cloud works.
If the scanner is jamming in the same spot every time, that is a paper path problem rather than a software one. Scanning a photocopy at standard letter size often gets a jammed original through.
For anything that is the scanner itself rather than the invoice, see Invoice scanner common issues. If it needs registering to your Epson account again, that is in Invoice scanner setup.
Multi page invoices
A multi page invoice needs to arrive as one PDF containing all the pages. If your scanner is set to create a separate file per page, Santé receives several one page invoices and none of them will look right.
Check the multi page or duplex setting on the scanner before rescanning. If you already have the pages as one PDF on the computer, you can skip the scanner and upload the PDF directly.
The invoice is in Receiving but the products are wrong
This is a different problem, and it means the pipeline worked. The invoice was read and the products were matched against your catalog, and some of those matches are wrong.
That is expected on the first invoice from a new distributor. Correct the matches in the review screen before receiving. Santé learns from your corrections, so the same distributor should match better next time. It is worth taking the time to fix them properly on the first few invoices from any new supplier.
If a line on the invoice is a product you do not carry yet, you can create it without leaving the invoice. See Creating a new product from the invoice page.
Do not receive an invoice with incorrect matches to save time. Receiving is what writes to your inventory and updates your costs, so a wrong match becomes a wrong stock count and a wrong margin.
What to send support
The store name
The distributor and the invoice number
What status the invoice is showing, if it appears at all
Whether it was a single page or multi page
Whether other invoices from the same distributor have worked before
If stock needs to be on the shelf before this is resolved, add it by hand in the meantime with Adding product stock manually, and remember not to receive the same invoice again afterwards or the stock counts double.
Related articles
Receiving via the Santé invoice scanner — the normal flow, end to end
Uploading a PDF of your invoice — when you already have the file and want to skip the scanner
Invoice scanner common issues — problems with the scanner itself
Invoice scanner setup — including registering it to your Epson account again
Creating a new product from the invoice page — for lines that are not in your catalog yet
Adding product stock manually — getting stock on the shelf while an invoice is stuck
Receiving report — checking what was actually received