We had similar business requirement in a previous project 
The reason why they asked for that was that the company planned to automate/outsource/centralize their CM processing and they need some data, based on which to estimate the current workload, approximate cost of outsourcing, future benefits of a combination of the three approaches.
At that time we had some developments in credit management, which resulted in credit status changes. On top of that the company needed to consider also the case when the credit clerk rechecks the document instead of releasing it, which results in change of status, so we could not use only the change documents.
We ended up with a z-table, where we recorded status changes with timestamps, recheck/release process and a lot more on certain events.