Payout held for a "routine compliance review", 19 days and counting

Two years with this network, never a late payment, never a query. December invoice goes in and instead of the payment I get a form email from an address I've never seen before: payment held pending a routine compliance review.

What they want is company registration documents, proof of address dated in the last three months, a declaration of traffic sources and a beneficial ownership form. Nineteen days so far. The AM is as confused as I am and says he can't see anything on his side beyond a flag.

My question isn't whether to send the documents, I've sent them. It's whether anyone has seen this take a defined amount of time, or whether "review" here means the same thing it means when they're about to keep the money.

This one is almost certainly not the network, and I think that distinction will make the next two weeks less unpleasant for you.

The documents you have listed are a know-your-business pack; it is the standard set a payables provider or a bank collects when a counterparty crosses a monitoring threshold. Nobody at the network decided you were suspicious. A rule fired, and the rule sits at their processor, which is also why your account manager can see a flag and nothing behind it.

Two things follow from that. First, the review has an owner who is not the person you have been emailing, and the useful question to the AM is "who is conducting the review", not "where is my money". Second, these reviews do complete; in my experience the median is around three weeks from the point the last document arrives, not from the point the hold started. If they came back to you asking for one document in a different format, the clock restarted then.

One piece of housekeeping while you wait: make sure the entity name on your invoices matches the registration document exactly, including the suffix. A mismatch there is the single most common reason one of these drags into a second month.

send the documents or don't get paid. there isn't a third option and nineteen days isn't long for this

Did this invoice cross ten thousand for the first time?

11,400. First one over ten in two years, and the previous high was about 8k.

So that's the threshold, presumably. Nobody mentioned it existed.

Since you now know where the line is, the thing not to do is invoice 9,800 next month.

I know two people who tried exactly that and both ended up in a worse review than the one they were avoiding, because a counterparty whose invoices suddenly cluster just under a reporting threshold is a specific pattern that the same monitoring looks for. It reads as deliberate, and it is.

Do the paperwork once, properly, at the entity level. It's a bad fortnight and then it never happens again — every invoice after this one goes through a counterparty that's already been reviewed.

Paid this morning. Day 26 from the hold, day 11 from the last document, which lines up with what quietaccountant said about the clock.

The entity name thing was real, incidentally — my invoices had been going out without the "Pte Ltd" on the end since 2024 and that was one of the two queries. Worth checking yours before it's holding up five figures.