Every payables team tracks invoices in some form, and most tracking answers the question nobody asks. What invoices do we have is easy and rarely useful. What is stuck, for how long, and with whom is the question that comes from a finance director, a supplier or a month-end deadline, and answering it requires three fields that most informal tracking does not carry.
Status from a fixed vocabulary
Received, matched, in exception, approved, paid. A short fixed list, because free text drifts within days into variants that cannot be counted. Fixed status is what lets you say how many invoices are at each stage, and that single number is the beginning of managing a queue rather than working through one.
Age, measured from entering the current state
Not the invoice date and not the date received, but how long it has been in its current status. That is what identifies the stuck ones. An invoice that has been awaiting approval for a day and one that has been awaiting approval for a month are indistinguishable in a list sorted by supplier, and they need entirely different responses.
Owner, a person and not a team
Who currently holds it. Shared ownership produces items that everybody can see and nobody progresses. Naming an owner also makes chasing possible without being adversarial: one conversation about the three oldest items with a specific person is more effective and far less irritating than a weekly list sent to everyone.
Questions people ask about invoice tracking
What should we measure weekly?
The count by status and the age of the oldest item in each queue. Two numbers, and they will tell you where to spend attention before anything escalates.
Does the accounting system already track this?
It tracks invoices that have been posted. The stuck ones are usually the ones not yet posted, which is exactly the population missing from that view.
Is a spreadsheet adequate?
To begin with, yes. It fails when several people edit it, when you need the document attached, or when you need to trust the history months later.