Every payables team tracks invoices somehow, and most tracking answers the question nobody asks. What invoices exist is easy and rarely useful. What is stuck, for how long, and with whom is the question that arrives from a finance director, a supplier or a month-end deadline, and answering it needs three fields that informal tracking usually lacks.
Status from a fixed list
Received, matched, in exception, awaiting approval, approved, paid. Fixed rather than free text, because free text drifts within days into variants that cannot be counted. A fixed list is what makes the queue reportable, and being able to count the queue is the beginning of managing it rather than merely working through it.
Age from entering the current state
Not the invoice date and not the received date, but how long it has been where it is. That is what identifies the stuck ones. Two invoices awaiting approval, one for a day and one for a month, are indistinguishable in a list sorted by supplier and need completely different responses.
An owner who is a person
Not a team. Shared ownership produces items everybody can see and nobody progresses. A named owner also makes chasing constructive: one short conversation about somebody's three oldest items works better, and irritates less, than a weekly list of everything sent to everybody.
Questions people ask about invoice tracking system
Can a spreadsheet be the tracking system?
Yes at modest volume, if one person maintains it. It fails when several people edit it, when the document needs attaching, or when the history has to be trusted a year later.
Does our accounting system already do this?
It tracks posted invoices. The stuck ones are usually not yet posted, which is exactly the population missing from that view.
What should be reviewed weekly?
Count by status, and the age of the oldest item in each. Two numbers, minutes to produce.