Make an invoice

How it works

An invoice is a request for money that has to survive somebody else's paperwork. It lands in an inbox, gets forwarded to whoever approves spending, then waits in a queue behind other people's invoices. Anything missing from it turns into an email, and an email turns into another week before you see the money. The layout here exists to remove those emails.

What accounts payable looks for

Six things decide whether an invoice can be paid without a conversation: your trading name and address, the client's name as their own records hold it, a reference unique to this document, the date you issued it, the date you expect payment, and an itemised breakdown that adds up to the total shown. All six are on the page this tool draws. If you are registered for VAT or sales tax, the registration number belongs on it too, and the notes field at the bottom is where it usually goes.

Bank details are the other common omission. A client who wants to pay and cannot find an account number rarely writes to ask for one, so put the account, the routing or sort code, and any reference they should quote into the notes. A payment link or a card instruction goes in the same place.

Numbering, and the audit trail

Give every invoice its own reference and never reuse one. Sequential numbering is the convention because a gap is a question an auditor is entitled to ask, while a duplicate reference is a payment that goes out twice or never at all. A prefix per client (NW-014) or per year (2026-014) works as well as a plain counter, so long as no two documents share a string.

Dates print in year-month-day order. It is the one written form that a client who reads 04/09 as the fourth of September and a client who reads it as the ninth of April will both get right. Overwrite either date field with your own wording where a recipient expects something else, and the term beside the due date steps aside.

Tax gets its own line

Tax is shown at its own rate on its own line rather than folded into the prices above it. A client reclaiming the tax needs the amount stated separately, and a tax authority reviewing your return expects to find the same figure on your copy of the document. Set the rate to zero where you are not registered, or where the work falls outside the scope, and the line disappears rather than printing a zero.

Rounding happens once, on the subtotal, to the nearest cent. Each line amount is a quantity multiplied by a unit price held in whole cents, so six hours at 19.99 comes to 119.94 instead of the 119.94000000000001 that floating point gives you. A document disagreeing with itself by one cent is a document somebody has to query before paying it.

Terms decide when you get paid

Thirty days from issue is what most finance departments assume when nothing else is stated, so the due date starts there. Shorter terms are normal for a small supplier and worth asking for. Setting the due date equal to the issue date prints Due on receipt, which states what you want, though plenty of accounts departments will still pay it on their monthly run.

The term is worked out from the gap between your two dates rather than picked from a list, so it cannot contradict them. A calendar date prints beside it either way, because a bare term asks the reader to do arithmetic before they know when to pay. A late fee named on the invoice before the work started is also far easier to apply than one invented after the due date has passed.