Free Invoice Generator

What belongs on an invoice

An invoice is simply a request to be paid. In Pakistan and India most people just call it a bill, and this tool works the same way as a bill generator. Either way, it needs six pieces of information to do its job, and the form above walks you through them in this order.

1. Your business. Your legal name, address and email, and your tax number if you're registered.
2. Your client. Who the invoice is for, with their address, and their tax number where your country asks for it.
3. A unique number and dates. When you issued it, and the date you expect to be paid by.
4. Line items. What you did or sold, how many, the price of each, and the amount.
5. Totals. The subtotal, any discount, the tax, and what is due in the end.
6. Payment details. Your bank, account number or IBAN, or whatever else the client needs to send the money.

Forget the payment details and you'll almost certainly be paid late. Someone in accounts has to email you to ask, and that email sits in a queue for a week.

How the totals are worked out

The order of the sums is where a lot of invoices go wrong, and a wrong total is the quickest way to get one disputed.

A discount on the whole invoice is taken off before any tax is added. Say you bill 1,000 and give 10% off: that leaves 900, and the tax is charged on 900. Not on the 1,000 you started with.

Shipping comes after that. It can have its own tax rate, since plenty of countries tax delivery differently from the goods themselves. If you'd like the discount to cover shipping as well, there's a tick box for that.

Withholding tax, explained simply

If you've ever been paid less than your invoice said and couldn't work out why, this is usually the reason.

With withholding tax, your client holds back a slice of your fee and pays it to the tax office on your behalf. That money never reaches your account, but it isn't gone. It's counted against the tax you owe when you file at the end of the year.

Freelancers and contractors in Pakistan, India and the Philippines deal with this all the time, and so do people in many other countries. Enter the rate in the Withholding tax box, and the invoice shows both the deduction and the amount your client will really transfer.

The rate is applied to the amount after discounts, with shipping included, but before tax. It doesn't change the tax at all. In the example above, 10% of 950 is 95, so your client holds back 95 and sends you 1,008.

Putting it on the invoice saves an awkward back-and-forth later about why the payment came in short.

Why an issued invoice cannot be edited

In a free account, every invoice begins life as a draft. You can change whatever you want, as often as you want, and it doesn't have a number yet.

Once you issue it, it gets its number and its PDF, and from then on it's locked. We built it that way on purpose.

The reason is simple: an invoice you've sent is a financial record. In most countries the tax rules don't allow a number to be reused or an issued invoice to be quietly changed. When something is wrong, you raise a credit note that cancels part or all of it, and both documents stay on file.

Without an account there's nothing to lock. Your draft lives in your browser, you can keep editing it, and every changed version simply becomes a new PDF.

Attaching timesheets, receipts and photos

Some clients won't pay until they've seen proof. With a free account you can add up to 10 PDFs or images, 10 MB each, and the ones you tick are placed in the same PDF after an index page.

It's handy for logged hours, expenses you're passing on, delivery notes or before-and-after photos. A single file is also far easier for a client to forward to their accounts team than an email with five attachments.

Numbering your invoices

Every invoice needs a number of its own, and the numbers should follow on from each other. In an account, the number is assigned at the moment you issue, so a draft you abandon never leaves a gap. Without an account, you type the number yourself in the invoice details.

An auditor spots missing or repeated numbers straight away. Numbers in order also help you, six months later, when a client asks about "that invoice from March".

Getting paid faster

• Give a real due date. "Due 3 November" gets paid sooner than "due on receipt".
• Describe each line the way your client's finance team will recognise it, not in your own shorthand.
• Put the full payment details on the invoice itself, not just in the email.
• Send it the day the work is done. Waiting until the end of the month only delays your money.
• Mention any late fee in the terms box before you ever need to charge one.
• For a big amount, attach the timesheet or the receipts so nobody has to ask.

Designs, paper size, currency and language

You can pick from 17 designs. Each comes with its own font pairing, there are 5 other fonts you can switch to, and you can choose an accent colour from the row or mix your own. The preview uses the same template and fonts as the PDF, so nothing moves around when you download it.

Paper size is A4 or US Letter. Most of the world uses A4. Clients in the United States and Canada print on Letter, so pick that for them and the margins won't get cut off.

Currency and invoice language are both set in the invoice details. Add a second language and every heading is printed in both, which is common in the Gulf, where Arabic and English sit side by side.

If you're not signed in, your invoice is kept in your own browser. The PDF we generate for you is deleted from our servers an hour later, automatically, and everything travels over HTTPS.

When you upload a logo, its photo metadata is removed, so camera details or a location saved in the original file go nowhere.

Signed in, your invoices and saved clients stay in your account so you can come back to them. Nobody here reads them, and they're never used to train anything.

One honest note: Convertavo makes invoices, it isn't your accountant. Tax rules differ from country to country and they change, so if you're unsure about something, ask a qualified accountant where you live.