Invoice tracking that shows what is sent, viewed and paid

Why invoice tracking matters

Sending an invoice is only half of the job. The other half is knowing what happened next. Without a tracker, the answer lives in your memory, your inbox and your bank statement, and those three rarely agree. A payment arrives without a reference, a client says they never received the email, an invoice from two months ago turns out to be unpaid, and an hour disappears into detective work.

A good invoice tracker replaces that guesswork with a single list. Each row is one document, each document has one status, and the status changes when something real happens: you send it, the client opens it, you record a payment, or the due date passes. That list tells you who to thank, who to remind and how much money is still on its way.

Every status, and what moves an invoice into it

Prima Invoice uses a small, fixed set of statuses so that the meaning of each one never drifts. Every status has its own label and marker shape, so you can read the list even without relying on colour.

Quotes, estimates and receipts sit in the same list with their own types, so you can follow a job from the first quote to the final receipt. When a client accepts a quote or estimate, converting it to an invoice keeps every line, tax, discount and total, and the new invoice starts its own journey at Draft.

How the Viewed status is measured, and why it is strict

Many tools mark an email as opened with a tiny invisible image, often called a tracking pixel. That method has two problems. Plenty of mail apps block remote images, so a real reader can look like a non-reader. And corporate email security gateways often open messages and links automatically to scan them for threats, so a robot can look like an eager client.

Prima Invoice does not use pixels. Each invoice you send has a private online page with a long random address. The status changes to Viewed only when that page actually loads in a web browser and runs a small script. A plain request without a browser, a link preview, a known scanner or your own visit while you are signed in does not count. Viewed therefore means what it says: somebody looked at the invoice on a screen.

The practical benefit is trust in your own data. If an invoice shows Sent for days, the client probably has not opened it, and the email may be in a spam folder. That is a cue to check the address or send a quick personal message with the link. If it shows Viewed but unpaid, the client knows about it, and a polite payment reminder is the right next step.

Tracking payments, including partial ones

Prima Invoice does not connect to your bank, and it never handles your money, so it learns about payments the simplest way: you tell it. Recording a payment takes three fields, the date, the method and the amount. You can record as many payments against an invoice as you receive.

When the recorded payments are less than the total, the invoice becomes Partially paid, and the remaining balance appears on the online invoice page and on the PDF. When they reach the total, the invoice becomes Paid and any scheduled reminders stop. A short example shows how it works:

Deposits, milestone payments and instalment plans all fit this pattern. Because the balance updates on the client's copy of the invoice too, there is never a disagreement about how much is left, and a receipt for the full amount can be created from the same details once the last payment arrives.

Changing an invoice after you sent it

Mistakes happen: a wrong quantity, a missing purchase order number, an address that changed. In Prima Invoice, a sent invoice is locked so that the record of what you sent stays intact. Editing it creates a new revision with the same invoice number, the earlier version is kept, and you choose whether to email the corrected version to the client. The online invoice page always shows the latest revision.

This matters for tracking because the number is how both you and your client refer to the document. Keeping the number stable avoids the confusion of two invoices for one job, while the revision history shows exactly what changed and when.

Track by invoice number

Invoice numbers are the backbone of any tracking system. Clients quote them on bank transfers, accountants match them against payments, and tax authorities in many countries expect them to be unique. GOV.UK, for example, lists a unique identification number among the things a UK invoice must include.

Prima Invoice accounts number documents automatically, per document type, using a pattern you choose, such as INV-2026-0001. The number is assigned at the moment you finalise a document, not when you start a draft, so abandoned drafts never leave gaps in the sequence. If you type a number manually that already exists, Prima Invoice rejects it, which prevents duplicates from slipping in.

Quotes, estimates and receipts get their own sequences with their own prefixes, QUO, EST and RCT by default, so each type of document can be searched and counted separately.

Spotting overdue invoices early

An invoice becomes Overdue when its due date has passed and a balance is still open. Seeing that status the morning it happens is far more useful than finding out at the end of the quarter. Overdue invoices are the ones to follow up first, ideally with a short personal message on top of the automatic reminder.

Clear payment terms make overdue tracking meaningful. Net 30, for instance, is commonly written on an invoice to show that it must be paid within 30 days. If you trade in the UK or the EU, the law also sets default payment periods when a contract is silent, which our payment reminders page summarises with links to the official sources.

Delivery problems you can actually see

A tracker is only useful if it tells you when something went wrong. If the receiving mail server rejects an invoice email, Prima Invoice marks the invoice Delivery failed, so you can correct the address and send it again instead of waiting for a payment that will never come.

Prima Invoice also has a daily sending limit while it runs on a small shared email plan. When it is reached, invoices are marked Queued and go out automatically as soon as there is room. In the meantime you can copy the link to the online invoice and share it with your client yourself.

Export everything to CSV

Your records should never be locked inside a tool. A Pro account can export documents, clients and products to CSV files that open correctly in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or any accounting package that imports CSV. Files are saved as UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so names with accents and non-Latin characters display properly.

Exports are also protected against a known spreadsheet risk called CSV injection, where a cell starting with characters such as an equals sign can be treated as a formula. Prima Invoice neutralises those cells before writing the file, following the guidance published by the OWASP security community.

Many accountants prefer a monthly CSV over access to yet another app, and an export doubles as a portable backup you can archive alongside contracts and receipts. Export the documents for the period, send the file, and the reconciliation can start straight away.

How to keep track of invoices in a spreadsheet

If you send only a few invoices a month, a spreadsheet can work as a simple invoice tracker. The free invoice generator produces the PDFs, and the sheet holds the status. Use one row per invoice and these columns:

If you prefer to keep the invoices themselves in a spreadsheet too, the invoice template for Excel has working formulas for line totals, subtotal, tax and total. The weakness of a spreadsheet is that nothing updates by itself. Someone has to change the status when an email bounces, when a client opens the invoice or when a payment arrives, and the sheet quietly goes stale when that someone is busy. That is the moment an account with automatic statuses starts paying for itself.

A fifteen-minute weekly invoice review

Tracking only helps if you look at it. A short, regular review keeps cash flow predictable and stops small problems from turning into awkward conversations. Pick a fixed slot, such as Monday morning with a coffee, and work through the list in this order.

• Delivery failed and Queued first. Fix any wrong addresses and make sure nothing is stuck before you chase anyone.
• Overdue next, oldest first. Decide whether each one needs a personal call, a message with the link, or simply the automatic reminder that is already scheduled.
• Sent but not Viewed for more than a few days. The client may never have seen the email; resend it or share the online link directly.
• Viewed but unpaid. The client knows about the invoice. Check whether they need anything, like a purchase order, a supplier registration form or confirmed bank details.
• Partially paid. Confirm the instalment plan is on track and the balances match your bank account.
• Paid this week. Send receipts where clients expect them, and thank the people who paid early.

Reading your receivables by age

Accountants often group unpaid invoices into age brackets, usually current, 1 to 30 days late, 31 to 60, 61 to 90 and over 90. The idea is simple: the older a debt gets, the less likely it is to be collected in full, so attention should flow towards the oldest buckets first.

You can build that view from a Prima Invoice CSV export in a few minutes. Sort by due date, subtract it from today's date, and group the balances. Seeing, for instance, that most of your outstanding money sits in one client's 61 to 90 day bucket is a strong signal to talk to that client about terms, a deposit or a payment plan before taking on the next project.

Working with an accountant or bookkeeper

A Prima Invoice account is used by one person today; team members and roles are planned for a later phase. Most freelancers and small owners share their numbers with an accountant through exports rather than logins anyway. Send the CSV of documents for the month or quarter, along with the client list, and your bookkeeper can reconcile payments against bank statements without asking you for screenshots.

Prima Invoice is not bookkeeping software. It does not keep a ledger, file tax returns or run payroll. It keeps the invoicing side clean, numbered and exportable, which is exactly what makes the accounting side faster.

What about time tracking?

Prima Invoice is an invoicing tool, not a timesheet app, so it does not run a timer. If you bill by the hour, enter the hours as the quantity and your hourly rate as the unit price on each line, for example 12.5 hours at 80.00. Many freelancers keep their timer in a separate app and copy the weekly or monthly totals onto the invoice, which keeps the invoice short and easy for the client to approve. The legal invoice template and the IT services invoice template show hourly lines laid out this way.

Free generators versus an account

Browser-only invoice generators are fast, but most of them cannot track anything after you download the PDF. invoice-generator.com, for example, says on its help page that it uses your browser's local storage to remember invoices, and that clearing your browser history will clear all of your invoices and they cannot be recovered (checked 25 October 2026). Its help page also says invoices can be sent to customers with an account.

Prima Invoice works the same way on purpose for its free generator: what you type stays in your browser, and you can export a draft as a JSON file to keep a copy. Tracking starts when you choose to save documents in an account, because a status needs somewhere to live and an email needs to be sent from somewhere. During Early Access, Pro features, including invoice tracking, are free for signed-in users. See pricing for the planned price.

Who can see an invoice page

Each online invoice page has an address built from a random token of 128 bits, which is practically impossible to guess. A wrong or expired token simply shows a not-found page. Invoice pages are also marked so that search engines do not index them. Only the people you share the link with, normally your client, can open it.

Inside your account, the data is stored in a database with row-level security, so each account can only ever read its own documents, clients and products.

Start tracking your invoices

Sign in with your email address, set up your business profile with your currency, time zone and number pattern, add a client, and send your first invoice from the account. Its status appears straight away and changes as your client opens and pays it. Prefer to try the editor first? Open the free invoice generator, no account needed.