Ageing unmatched invoices before they age your reputation
· Daniel Okeke
An unmatched invoice is not one problem. A missing goods receipt is different from a price dispute, which is different from a duplicate. Treating them as a single queue guarantees the wrong work gets done first.
Age by root cause and by supplier criticality. Items blocking a strategic supplier deserve a different clock from low-value stationery variances. Publish a weekly ageing that finance and procurement both see — shared visibility reduces the ‘I thought you had it’ cycle.
Set a hard rule: anything over thirty days needs a named owner and a next action date. Anything over sixty days needs a finance-lead review. Without that ladder, exceptions quietly become accruals nobody trusts.
If your current export cannot produce cause codes, start with a manual classification of the top fifty by value. That sample alone usually funds the case for cleaner exception handling.