Almost every payables team has an invoice tracker of some kind, usually a spreadsheet, and almost all of them fail at the same question: not what invoices do we have, which is easy, but which ones are stuck and who is holding them up, which is the one anybody actually asks. The difference between a list and a tracker is four fields, and adding them to a spreadsheet is often enough before buying anything.
Status, from a fixed list
Received, matched, in exception, approved, paid. A fixed list matters more than the particular words, because free text status columns drift within a week into a dozen phrasings that cannot be counted. Once status is a fixed list, the tracker can answer how many invoices are at each stage, which is the first question anybody with a target asks.
Reason, on anything that is not moving
An invoice in exception is stuck for a cause: price variance, quantity difference, no purchase order, no goods receipt, missing supplier detail. Recording which one converts an undifferentiated pile into a set of queues with different owners. It also tells you, over a month, which upstream problem is generating most of your work, and that is usually a surprise.
Owner and date, so ageing is real
Who currently holds it, and when it reached that state. Without the date, a tracker cannot age anything, and ageing is the whole point: an invoice that has been waiting two days and one that has been waiting five weeks look identical in a list sorted by supplier. With owner and date you can chase the oldest item held by one person, which is a conversation, instead of chasing everything, which is noise.
Questions people ask about invoice tracker
Is a spreadsheet good enough as an invoice tracker?
For a while, yes, and it is a much better starting point than nothing. It stops being enough when more than one person edits it, when you need the document attached to the row, or when you need to trust it a year later.
What is the difference between an invoice tracker and an accounting system?
The accounting system holds invoices that have been accepted and coded. The tracker is about the stretch before that, when an invoice exists but is not yet a transaction, which is where the delays live.
Should the tracker hold the invoice document too?
Ideally yes, because the first thing anybody does when they see a stuck row is go and look at the invoice. A tracker that forces a search through a mailbox to answer that has given back half of what it saved.