Tracking outstanding document requests
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Every organisation chases paperwork: signed contracts, insurance certificates, supplier compliance documents, policy acknowledgements, expiring qualifications. It is almost always done by email, which means the status of the whole thing lives in one person's inbox — and when they are away, nobody can answer what is outstanding.
Describe it to Sharelio, the AI platform for building SharePoint tools: “a document request tracker with counterparty, document type, requested date, due date, status and owner, showing overdue first”, and put it on the page the team already uses.
The decision to make first is the one people get wrong: are you tracking the request, or storing the document? They are different jobs and the answer is usually both, in two places.
List or library?
| A list | A document library | |
|---|---|---|
| Holds | The request and its status | The file itself |
| A row exists before the document arrives | Yes — this is the whole point | No |
| Chasing what has not arrived | Natural | Impossible: what is missing has no row |
| Version history of the file | No | Yes |
| Metadata on the file | Via attachment, awkwardly | Native |
The second row settles it. A library can only tell you about documents that exist, and the entire purpose of this tool is the ones that do not yet. Track requests in a list; store the arrived files in a library, linked from the row. Trying to do both in a library is the most common mistake here and it produces a tool that cannot chase anything.
Building it
- Columns: counterparty (text or person), document type (choice), requested date, due date, status (requested / received / expired / not required), owner (person), and a link or attachment for the document once it lands.
- Expiry matters as much as arrival. Insurance certificates and qualifications expire, so an expiry date column with a view for the next 60 days turns this from a one-off chase into an ongoing control.
- Two views: overdue, and expiring soon. Those are the only two anyone opens.
- Put it where the team works and give a KPI tile with the outstanding count — that number is what makes people act.
If you are on the free route, a formatted list view with conditional colours covers most of this. What it will not do is the outstanding count, because JSON formatting cannot aggregate.
The chasing itself
A tracker records; it does not chase. Three options, in increasing effort:
- A weekly view and a human. Unfashionable, free, and works. Someone opens the overdue view every Monday.
- Power Automate reminders, using standard connectors: a scheduled flow that emails owners their overdue rows. This is the highest-value automation and costs nothing.
- Requesting documents from outside the organisation. If the counterparty is a supplier or client, they cannot see your list. That means a form, a shared link, or an email — and this is where projects grow, so decide early whether external submission is in scope.
That last point deserves an explicit answer before you start. "Also let suppliers upload it themselves" is a different, larger project than an internal tracker, with its own security review.
Frequently asked questions
Can external parties upload documents into this?
Not into a plain internal list. The usual routes are a Microsoft Forms submission that a flow writes into the list, a specifically shared library folder, or email to a monitored mailbox with someone attaching the file. All three work; all three add scope, and the security implications of external access are worth settling before building rather than after.
How do we handle documents that expire and need re-requesting?
Keep an expiry date column and a view filtered to the next 60 days, and treat a renewal as a new row rather than editing the old one. That preserves the history of what was held and when — which is exactly what an audit asks for, and what editing in place destroys.
Should the actual files live in the list as attachments?
For a handful of small files, attachments are fine and simple. For anything that needs version history, metadata, retention policies or approval, put the files in a document library and link the row to them. Attachments are convenient and are the weakest option in every other respect.
How is this different from a compliance product?
A compliance product adds workflow, external portals, e-signature integration and audit certification. If you have regulatory obligations that name those capabilities, buy the product. If what you actually need is to know which six suppliers have not sent their certificate, a list and a view answer it this afternoon at no cost.