Invoice tracking: see when your client opens it

The week after you send it

An emailed PDF goes quiet. There is no difference, from your side, between a client who has not opened it, a client who opened it and is thinking, and a client who opened it, decided the third line was too expensive, and has not worked out how to say so. All three look identical, and all three end with you writing the same awkward message four days later.

Tracking removes the guess. It does not chase anyone for you. It tells you which of those three you are dealing with, which is the part that decides what you say next.

What you see

Every action lands on the document's own timeline in your dashboard, in order:

• When the link was opened, and each time it was opened again.
• How long they stayed. Forty seconds is a glance. Four minutes is someone reading the prices.
• Which lines they approved, one at a time, and which they did not.
• What they wrote against a line they had a problem with, in their own words.
• Extra work they asked for, as a request that does not move your total until you have priced it and agreed it.
• Their signature, with the date, the time and the address it came from.

Approving line by line, not all or nothing

A quote that can only be accepted or refused turns one disputed line into a lost job. Your client can approve the parts they want and flag the one they do not, with a sentence saying why. You get an objection you can answer instead of silence you have to interpret.

It also settles the argument afterwards. A client who approved a line has a record of approving it, which is the whole reason change orders exist on paper jobs.

Signing without printing anything

Your client signs on the page, on a phone, with a finger. The signature is recorded with the date, the time, their IP address and their browser, and the page tells them so before they sign rather than after. That record is what makes a signature mean something later. It is kept with the document and appears on the copy you export.

What stays free

Everything except tracked sending. The invoice generator, the quote generator, the receipt maker, the work order editor, the timesheet calculator, the credit note, proforma invoice, sales order, packing slip and account statement editors, every calculator work with no account, no limit and no expiry (template designs need a free account), and none of it stores what you type. That has not changed and is not going to.

Tracking is the one thing that cannot work that way, because a link your client opens has to exist somewhere for them to open it.

Sent, viewed, paid, overdue

Invoice tracking usually means two things: knowing whether the client has seen the invoice, and knowing which invoices are still unpaid. A tracked link covers the first on its own. For the second, every tracked document sits on your dashboard with its status, so the list of what is owed is the list of documents still marked sent or viewed.

For invoices you download and email yourself, keep the same four columns in a spreadsheet: invoice number, date sent, due date and date paid. Once a due date passes, the days past due calculator tells you how late it is and what usually works at that age.

• SentThe link has gone out and is waiting to be opened.
• OpenedYour client loaded the page. Every later open after the first is logged too.
• ApprovedThe lines they confirmed on the document itself, one at a time.
• PaidMarked once the money has actually landed.

A tracked invoice can still stall between these states even when nothing is wrong with it. See why an invoice is not paid for a five-stage way to check where it got stuck.

How to send one

1. Build the invoice or quote the way you normally would.
2. Create a free account. It takes an email and a password.
3. On the finished document, send it as a link instead of downloading it.
4. Watch the timeline on your dashboard as your client works through it.

When it still goes quiet

Tracking tells you it was opened twice and ignored, which is a different problem from a lost email. At that point the useful things are a payment link that removes the friction, a stated late fee that gives the delay a cost, a due date printed as a date (the invoice due date calculator works it out), and the approach in what to do about an unpaid invoice.

Common questions