The email said my payment was stuck. It had already left for my bank.

On a Monday morning in September, my payment provider emailed to say it needed more information before it could go ahead. A verification document I’d sent had been rejected.

The day before, a company in the US had paid me. It was the first payment from a new part of my business, licensing software I’ve built. It wasn’t a big amount, but it was the first one, and I’d been waiting for it.

My notes, updated that morning, said what the email seemed to say: payment received, but blocked.

Then I logged in to the account itself instead of reading about it.

The payment had come in on Sunday, and I’d withdrawn it to my bank in Lagos the same day. Both showed as completed. The balance was zero because the money had already left. The rejected document was for a different verification request that had nothing to do with this payment. When I checked with my bank, the naira was there.

Nothing in the email was false. The provider did need a document. It just wasn’t about my payment, and the email didn’t say which request it was about. I filled that gap with the thing I was most worried about.

I’d nearly missed the good news as well. My email sorts messages into folders by itself, and it had put the payment notice, the withdrawal confirmation and the worrying email together in a folder I hardly open. If I’d only read my main inbox, I’d have thought nothing happened that weekend.

Running a business means reading messages like that all day: a bank alert, a warning from a platform, a supplier’s urgent email, someone’s summary in the team WhatsApp group. Each one is someone else’s account of what happened, sent when they decided to send it and worded the way their system words things.

So now, when a message worries me, I check the actual record before I react, and before I tell anyone else what’s going on. It takes about two minutes. That Monday it would have stopped me writing down a blocked payment that was already in my bank.