Excel Purchase Order Tracking: Where It Gets Messy (And What to Do About It)

Every purchasing process starts the same way. Someone needs something — materials, parts, stock, equipment — so they create a purchase order. In most small businesses, that purchase order is a row in a spreadsheet. PO number, supplier, items, quantity, price, date ordered, date expected. It works. For a while.

This article isn’t about telling you Excel is wrong for purchase orders. It’s about helping you spot the specific moments when your PO spreadsheet starts creating more problems than it solves — and what the alternatives look like.

Where Excel Handles Purchase Orders Fine

Credit where it’s due. Excel works well for PO tracking when:

• You deal with a handful of suppliers — you know them, they know you, and the relationships are straightforward
• One person handles purchasing — they own the spreadsheet, they update it, and they’re across every order
• Orders are infrequent — a few per week, not dozens per day
• There’s no formal approval process — the person ordering has the authority to order
• Invoice matching is simple — one PO, one invoice, one delivery, done

If that’s your business right now, a clean Excel table with PO numbers, supplier details, order dates, expected delivery, status, and invoice status will serve you well. Add conditional formatting for overdue deliveries and you’ve got a functional system for nothing.

Breaking Point 1: Invoice Matching Becomes a Treasure Hunt

This is where the pain starts. A supplier sends an invoice. You need to match it to a PO. In a simple world, the PO number is on the invoice, you find the row in your spreadsheet, tick it off. Two minutes.

In the real world, it’s rarely that clean. Partial deliveries mean one PO generates multiple invoices. Suppliers combine multiple POs into one invoice. Prices on the invoice don’t match the PO because of surcharges, freight, or price changes that happened after the order. The invoice references a different PO number format than what’s in your spreadsheet.

Suddenly, matching a single invoice requires cross-referencing multiple rows, checking delivery receipts, calculating partial amounts, and hoping the numbers reconcile. Multiply that by 30 invoices a week and you’ve got someone spending half their time on what is essentially detective work.

The spreadsheet workaround is usually extra columns: “Invoice Number,” “Invoice Amount,” “Variance,” “Notes.” The notes column fills up with explanations like “short delivery, 14 of 20 received, balance due on next shipment.” It works, but it’s manual, error-prone, and completely dependent on whoever is maintaining it.

Breaking Point 2: Approval Workflows Don’t Exist

In most businesses, purchase orders above a certain threshold need approval. Maybe anything over $500 needs a manager’s sign-off. Maybe capital expenditure needs director approval. Maybe different categories of spending have different approval chains.

In Excel, approval is a column. Someone types “Approved” or “Pending” next to a row. There’s no mechanism to notify the approver, no way to enforce that approval happens before the order is placed, and no record of when approval was granted or by whom.

What actually happens: someone walks over to the manager’s desk, says “I need to order X,” the manager nods, and the purchaser updates the spreadsheet. Or they email the manager, get a reply, and manually update the status. Or they just order it and update the spreadsheet afterwards, because the approval process is so clunky that people bypass it.

Breaking Point 3: No Visibility Across Suppliers and Spending

With one spreadsheet and a few suppliers, you can eyeball your purchasing patterns. But as the supplier list grows and order volume increases, basic questions become surprisingly hard to answer:

• How much have we spent with Supplier X this quarter? — Filter, sum, hope the supplier name is spelled consistently.
• What’s our total outstanding commitment? — Add up every PO that’s been placed but not yet invoiced. Across multiple tabs or files, this takes time.
• Are we getting the best pricing? — Comparing what you paid for the same item across different orders and suppliers requires manual cross-referencing.
• Which suppliers consistently deliver late? — You’d need to compare expected delivery dates with actual receipt dates across hundreds of rows.

These aren’t nice-to-have analytics. They’re the information you need to negotiate better terms, identify unreliable suppliers, and control costs. In a spreadsheet, generating these insights is a manual project. In a proper system, it’s a dashboard.

Breaking Point 4: Goods Received Notes Are an Afterthought

When a delivery arrives, someone needs to check what was received against what was ordered. In a proper procurement process, this creates a goods received note (GRN) — part of the three-way match: PO, GRN, invoice.

In Excel, receiving is usually informal. Someone checks the delivery, maybe ticks a column. Partial deliveries are a nightmare — there’s no clean way to record “received 14 of 20 units, balance expected next week” without cramming it into a notes field. Without reliable receipt data, invoice matching is guesswork. You’re paying invoices on trust rather than verification — and as volumes grow, paying for goods you didn’t receive adds up.

Making the Most of Excel While You’re Still Using It

If you’re not ready to move on yet, tighten up what you have:

• Standardise your PO numbering — use a consistent format (e.g., PO-2026-001) and never reuse numbers. A simple formula can auto-generate the next number.
• Use data validation for supplier names — a dropdown list prevents the same supplier being entered as “Smiths,” “Smith’s,” “Smith & Co,” and “Smiths Engineering” across different rows.
• Separate PO lines from PO headers — instead of one row per PO, consider a structure where each line item is its own row. This makes partial deliveries and line-level matching much easier.
• Track receipts explicitly — add columns for “Date Received,” “Quantity Received,” and “Received By.” Don’t rely on the notes field.
• Reconcile weekly — compare outstanding POs against expected delivery dates every week. Chase overdue deliveries before they become urgent.

Excel is a perfectly good starting point for purchase order tracking. The mistake is letting the spreadsheet grow unchecked until the workarounds consume more time than the actual purchasing decisions. When matching invoices takes longer than placing orders, it’s time for something better.