A document is stuck in "Needs review"

02What you're seeing

A document has the Needs review badge and the amber strip at the top of your Files page is still counting it. Hours, maybe days have passed. It is not resolving on its own.

03Most likely cause

It is waiting for you. Needs review is not an "in-progress" state — it is a "user input required" state. Hemma deliberately does not pick a value for you when its two AI providers disagree, or when it is not sure what kind of document this is. It hands the choice to you and waits.

The fix: Open the document. The detail page becomes a review screen. Pick the right type, or pick Option A vs. Option B for each disagreeing field, and tap Confirm. The document moves to Trusted immediately.

See reviewing and correcting what the AI extracted for the full walkthrough of each review screen.

04Other things to check

• You confirmed but the badge did not change. Refresh the page. The strip polls every few seconds and the badge updates with it. If it still shows after a refresh, the confirmation may not have saved — check your network connection and try again.

• The document is one of several waiting. The amber strip shows the total count, not which document. Tap Needs review on the strip to filter the Files list to just the ones that need you. Walk them in order.

• You see "Help me identify" but the dropdown does not have the right type. Pick Other. Hemma stores the file untouched and you can rename and tag it from the detail page.

• The disagreement is on a field that does not matter to you. Pick whichever option, confirm, then ignore. Confirming is what unlocks the budget impact downstream — without it, the invoice never counts toward your spend.

• You picked an option but neither was right. Pick the closer one, confirm, then edit the field on the detail page afterwards. The audit log captures both events.

• The document is from before you joined the project. Anyone on the project can resolve a review — it does not have to be the person who uploaded it. If the original uploader is unavailable, do it yourself.

05What it does not mean

• Hemma is not "still thinking". Processing takes about thirty seconds and is done long before the review state appears. Once the badge shows, no background work is happening.

• It is not a bug or a stall. A document landing in Needs review is the system catching uncertainty rather than masking it. The two-provider check exists precisely so disagreements surface for you.

06If none of this worked

If a review screen will not load, or the Confirm button does nothing after multiple tries, email hello@gethemma.app with:

• The document name and the URL of the detail page (so we can pull the document ID).
• Which review type you saw (type unknown / fields disagreement / line items disagreement).
• A screenshot if anything looked off.

We can dig into the extraction record from there.

07Related

• Reviewing and correcting what the AI extracted
• How AI document processing works
• The AI extracted the wrong amount or contractor