Free guide
How to track purchase orders in Excel
Most PO trackers fail from too many columns, not too few. Here is a layout that stays maintained, plus the status system that makes it actually useful.
Download the free Excel template.xlsx, pre-built with the columns and conditional formatting below. No email required.
A purchase order tracker only works if updating it takes less time than the problem it prevents. The usual failure mode is a spreadsheet with twenty columns that made sense on day one and stopped getting filled in by week three. Start smaller than feels sufficient.
The columns that actually matter
Nine columns, in this order:
- 1. PO number — your reference, not the supplier's.
- 2. Supplier name
- 3. Supplier email — so a follow-up never blocks on hunting for a contact.
- 4. Item / description — enough detail to identify it in an email, not a full spec sheet.
- 5. Order date
- 6. Promised date — the supplier's committed date, not your hoped-for one.
- 7. Status — see below.
- 8. Last contact date — the single most skipped column, and the one that matters most.
- 9. Notes — one line, updated after every supplier reply.
Leave out unit price, quantity breakdowns, and internal approval chains unless a specific person asks for them weekly. Every extra column is a place the sheet can go stale.
A status system with four values, not eight
More statuses feel more precise. In practice they just create more ways to leave an order in the wrong one. Four covers everything:
Unconfirmed
Order placed, no promised date back from the supplier yet. This is often the most urgent bucket, not the least — you don't even know if it's on schedule.
On track
Promised date confirmed and still comfortably in the future.
Due soon
Promised date is within the next 7 days. Worth a check-in, not yet a problem.
Overdue
Promised date has passed. Sort by how many days overdue, oldest first, and work top to bottom.
Conditional formatting worth setting up
Two rules do most of the work: highlight a row red if today's date is past the promised date, and amber if the promised date is within 7 days. That turns a flat list into something you can scan in ten seconds instead of reading row by row.
A third rule worth adding: flag any row where the last contact date is more than 7 days old and the order isn't closed. That catches the orders that quietly fell off your radar, which is usually where the worst surprises come from.
Where this breaks down
This layout holds up fine for a small, steady flow of orders. Two things tend to break it as volume grows: the sheet gets long enough that sorting and re-scanning it eats real time every morning, and the "last contact" column starts lagging because updating it after every email is easy to skip when you're busy.
That's the specific gap SupplierPing fills: it reads in the same columns from a CSV or Excel export, sorts orders into these same four buckets automatically, drafts the follow-up email for the ones that need one, and records the last contact date the moment you hit send. If the spreadsheet is still working for you, there's no reason to change anything — if the "last contact" column has started drifting, there's a 14-day free trial, no card required.