Free invoice generator

What has to be on a freelance invoice

An invoice is a payment instruction, and most of what makes one get paid quickly is administrative rather than persuasive. A missing reference number can park an invoice in an accounts payable queue for a month with nobody doing anything wrong.

Whatever tool you use, these elements should be on it:

• Your legal or trading name and address, and your tax registration number if you have one.
• The client's legal entity name — the company that signed, not the person who briefed you — and their billing address or accounts payable email.
• A unique invoice number, and the date you issued it.
• A due date as an actual date, not a phrase. "Net 14" means nothing to someone paying twelve invoices on a Friday afternoon.
• Line items that describe deliverables, with quantity, rate, and amount for each.
• The subtotal, any discount, tax shown as a separate line with its rate, and the total due.
• How to pay: bank details, a payment link, or both.
• Any purchase order or reference number the client asked you to quote. If they have a PO process, an invoice without the number is an invoice they cannot pay.

Line items that survive a review

"Design work — $3,200" invites a conversation. "Website design, five pages, two revision rounds — $3,200" describes something that was agreed and delivered, and it matches the scope the client already approved.

Bill extra work as its own line rather than folding it into the total. A separate "Additional revision round (beyond the two included)" line is a fact the client can check against the scope. The same amount hidden in a larger number looks like a price increase.

If you are billing hours, put the hours on the invoice. Quantity and rate on separate lines make an invoice auditable, and an auditable invoice gets queried less.

Invoice numbers and records

Number invoices sequentially across your whole business — INV-001, INV-002 — rather than restarting per client. A sequence with holes in it is the first thing an accountant or a tax inspector asks about, and per-client numbering guarantees duplicates.

Never reuse a number, even for an invoice you cancelled. If something has to change after you sent it, issue a credit note or a corrected invoice with a new number and say which one it replaces.

Keep a copy of every invoice you send. This tool does not keep one for you: the PDF is generated in your browser and the page forgets everything when you close the tab, so save the file somewhere you will still have it at tax time.

Discounts, tax, and the order they apply in

The order is fixed here and it matters: the discount comes off the subtotal, then tax applies to what is left. Taxing before the discount charges your client tax on money they never paid.

The tax rate and label are yours to set — VAT, GST, sales tax, or nothing at all. This tool does not know whether you are registered, what your rate is, or whether a given client is inside or outside your tax jurisdiction. Those are questions for your accountant, and getting them wrong is expensive in a way a calculator cannot save you from.

Every amount here is handled as a whole number of cents, and each line is rounded once. That is the same arithmetic PaloWorks uses on a real invoice, which is why the total at the bottom always equals the lines above it.

Why it is faster than a spreadsheet template

A spreadsheet invoice is fine until the third one, when you copy last month's file, forget to change the number, and send a client an invoice dated in the past for the wrong project. Then you fix the formula that broke when you inserted a row.

This generator gives you the same result without the copy: type, watch the preview, download. It is not trying to be your books. If you are sending more than a couple of invoices a month, chasing them, and matching them against scopes, that is the point where a real system starts paying for itself.