What to put on an invoice

An invoice is read by someone who was not in the room when the work was agreed. Most of what belongs on one answers a question that person would otherwise have to email you about, and each unanswered question slows the payment down. The invoice generator offers a fixed set of fields; here is what the main ones are for.

Who you are, and how to be paid

“From (you)” takes a name and a free-text block: the address you trade from, an email address or phone number someone actually monitors, and — if you are registered for a sales tax or VAT — your registration number. Worth checking: the name on the invoice should match the name on the account receiving the money. A payment to “Jordan Ellis” against an invoice from “Ellis Design Studio” can get held by whoever reconciles the two, silently.

Who the client is

“Bill to” works the same way, and the name matters. Businesses often trade under one name and are registered under another — a café operating as “Corner Roast” may be “Marchetti Holdings Ltd” on the register — and the registered name is generally the one the money is owed by, not the sign above the door. Billing the trading name invites an accounts department to return the document, and can muddy the record if the debt is ever argued about. Ask once, at the start. If the client uses purchase order numbers, put theirs in the details block or the notes; an invoice arriving without one where it is required tends to be filed rather than paid, and nobody tells you.

A number that is unique to you

The document number is a handle: what you quote in a chasing email, what the client quotes on the payment. It needs to be unique across everything you have ever issued — a duplicate defeats the point — and short enough to type. Left blank, the field fills itself from the issue date, so two documents made the same day would share a number; type your own. This tool does not number documents sequentially across sessions — nothing is stored, so it cannot know what you sent last month. The sequence is yours to keep, in a spreadsheet or a folder of saved PDFs. Numbering schemes are worth reading first.

Two dates, not one

The document date is the date of issue; the second date field is the due date. They do different jobs — the issue date says when the charge was raised and starts the clock, the due date says where it stops. Write a calendar date rather than “Net 30” alone, because terms given in days make the reader do arithmetic from a date they may take to be the day it landed. Payment terms covers the common ones.

Lines the client can recognize

A slow payment often has no dispute behind it — just a line the approver cannot match to anything they remember agreeing to. “Consulting services” with a four-figure number beside it sits until someone finds time to ask; “Onboarding documentation, 14 pages, drafted and revised, March 3–17” leaves nothing to ask. The reference worth including is the one the client thinks in. Two hundred lines are available, but three a client understands beat thirty they have to reconstruct.

Quantity and unit price

The unit price is the price of one of whatever the description names — one hour, one item, one day. Quantities are held to four decimal places, so a billed 3.3333 hours does not drift. For a fixed fee, the quantity is 1 and the unit price is the whole fee. Each line is quantity × unit price rounded once to the cent, so the printed lines add up to the printed subtotal; the methodology page works through that, and through where discount and shipping sit relative to tax.

Tax, if you charge it

Tax has three settings: “no tax”, “added on top”, or “already included”. The choice should match how you quoted the price. Quoted 1,200 plus tax, it is added on top; quoted 1,200 all in, it is already included, and the tax is extracted by dividing by one plus the rate rather than subtracting a percentage, which overstates the tax. The tax label is a separate field because the name varies; the one your customer will recognize is the right one. The rate you type is the rate applied — the tool does not look rates up or decide whether a sale is taxable. Sales tax and VAT explains the difference.

Payment instructions

The notes field is where you say how to pay: the account or method you accept, the currency the figures are in, and the invoice number to quote as a reference. If you charge interest or a fee on late payment, state it here if it was agreed in advance; some places also grant a statutory right to late-payment interest, and which applies depends on where you are.

What your jurisdiction may require

Everything above is general practice. Many countries also require specific items on a document that functions as a tax invoice — a registration number, a registered address, wording such as “tax invoice”, or a breakdown of tax by rate. What is required, and whether a simplified document is allowed, differs by country and sometimes by state or province. This site does not know where you are and does not give tax advice; the rules that apply are published by your own tax authority and repay one careful read. Whatever they are, the free-text blocks and the notes field are where they go.