You're chasing down an invoice that's two weeks overdue. Payment’s stalled, cash flow’s impacted, and when you finally ask your AP team what’s going on, the answer is:
“I sent it for review, but I haven’t heard back.”
Or worse: “Not sure if anyone looked at it.”
Now what?
At that point, you're stuck. You can't push, because you don’t actually know who’s touched the invoice—or if anyone has at all. It’s a bottleneck wrapped in silence.
That’s exactly the kind of micro-moment Centime surfaces directly inside the platform: Who opened the invoice, and when.
Why This Matters (More Than You Think)
In complex AP workflows—especially in mid-market orgs running NetSuite, Sage Intacct, or QuickBooks—you might have dozens of invoices circulating across business units, entity levels, and approval layers. But unless someone replies explicitly or marks something as approved, you're flying blind.
Centime’s invoice activity tracking adds two columns to your invoice view:
- Last Opened By
- Last Opened At
No fluff, no digging. Just a real-time signal that someone has engaged with the invoice.
It’s not just a nice-to-have. This tiny piece of metadata solves real pain for:
- AP managers trying to enforce SLAs across departments
- Controllers needing documentation for audit trails
- Accounting leads following up without guessing who to nudge
- Finance directors surfacing where bottlenecks are happening in the process
See Centime in action
Our innovative AR, AP and business banking solutions are powerful alone, and even better together.
Schedule a tailored demo with a Centime expert.
The Before-State: Guesswork and Gmail Archaeology
Without this visibility, the best you had was a breadcrumb trail across Outlook, Slack, or Google Chat:
- “Hey, did you get a chance to look at that invoice from Comdata?”
- “I think it was approved, but not sure if they opened it...”
- “Can you check your email again?”
Even if you're using shared inboxes or tagged notes in NetSuite, knowing if a reviewer actually opened the invoice was anyone’s guess. Especially when dealing with senior leaders who might be in the approval flow but too busy to reply—or worse, assume someone else handled it.
The result? Missed discounts. Late payments. Frustrated vendors. And a finance team constantly stuck in detective mode.
What This Looks Like in Centime (And How to Use It)
If you're in Centime's Invoice Summary View, you’ll see two columns right in your default or customizable table:
- Last Opened By: Pulls in the user who most recently clicked into the invoice view
- Last Opened At: Timestamp down to the minute of their last access
Here’s how you actually use this in practice:
See Centime in action
Our innovative AR, AP and business banking solutions are powerful alone, and even better together.
Schedule a tailored demo with a Centime expert.
📍 Real scenario: Tracking SLA compliance
You require invoice approvals to happen within 2 business days. You’ve routed the invoice, but nothing’s come back.
With these columns, you check:
- Was it opened within the first 24 hours?
- Who opened it—and are they the actual approver or someone else just snooping?
Now you don’t need to escalate blindly. You have evidence.
💡 Bonus tip: Use with filters + saved views
If you're managing high volumes (let's say 200+ invoices/month), create a Saved View in Centime for:
- Status: Sent for Approval
- Last Opened At: is empty or older than X days
That gives you an instant list of invoices that are at risk of stalling.
For Audits, This Is Gold
This feature also plugs a gap for compliance-heavy industries—healthcare, manufacturing, logistics—where auditors regularly ask for:
- Who reviewed a given invoice?
- When was it touched in the system?
- Was there visibility before approval or payment?
Now, that visibility is embedded into your audit trail. No retroactive guesswork or Slack screenshots.
And because this ties directly into Centime’s approval workflows (which already map to your ERP's logic), you have consistent, trustworthy data across both systems.
It’s a Tiny Box—But It’s Visibility You Didn’t Have Before
No, this isn’t a splashy, AI-powered, look-what-we-built feature. It’s not meant to be. It’s a real-world fix for a real-world gap.
Finance teams don’t need more dashboards. They need better micro-signals inside the flow of work—quiet indicators that help you know where things stand and where to push next.
That’s what this is.
See Centime in action
Our innovative AR, AP and business banking solutions are powerful alone, and even better together.
Schedule a tailored demo with a Centime expert.
Ready to See Who's Actually Opening Your Invoices?
Whether you’re already using Centime or exploring AP automation that goes deeper than surface-level status updates, this feature is one of those small things that solves a big headache.
If you're a user:
Head to your Invoice Summary, click Column Settings, and turn on “Last Opened By” and “Last Opened At.”
If you’re evaluating Centime:
Book a quick walkthrough to see how visibility like this fits into your approval and audit trail workflows.
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