Free Invoice Generator — Line Items, Tax, Printable Output

An invoice does two jobs, and they need different fields

An invoice is a payment request and a tax record at once. The fields that get you paid are about making it easy for a stranger in an accounts department to approve; the fields that make it valid are about being able to account for the money later. They overlap less than people expect, and leaving out either set costs you — the first in delay, the second at reconciliation.

The fields that get you paid

• A due date as a real calendar date. Not "Net 30". Whoever schedules the payment run should not have to work out when that lands, and you want an unambiguous date to point at when following up. The field here defaults to 30 days from today and can be set to anything.
• A number the client can quote. Payment references, queries and remittance advice all need something to cite. This generates one in the form INV-YYYY-001 using the current year, which is a common convention and, more importantly, short enough to type into a bank transfer reference.
• Line descriptions an approver recognises. The person signing off often is not the person who commissioned the work. "Consulting" gets set aside for someone to ask about; "Homepage rebuild — 10 hrs at agreed rate" gets approved. Each line takes a description, a quantity and a rate, and the line total is quantity times rate.

The fields that make it valid

A unique number, both parties' details, the date, and the tax treatment. Those are the constants. What sits on top of them is not: what a valid tax invoice must show, which registration number belongs on it, and whether tax applies at all depend on your country and on whether you are registered. Settle that once with someone who knows your local rules rather than deciding invoice by invoice — it is a half-hour question with a permanent answer.

Numbering, which is the part people improvise

Gaps and duplicates are what turn a year of invoices into a reconciliation problem, and they are hard to explain if anyone ever asks. The rule that avoids nearly all of it: keep one sequence for your whole business and carry it forward. Not one per client, not a restart when you change tools. If the last one you sent was INV-2026-042, the next is 043 whoever it goes to.

One tax rate, and what to do when that is not enough

A single percentage applies to the whole subtotal — 18% by default, which suits a single-rate regime. It genuinely does not handle a mixed invoice where goods and services attract different rates, or where some lines are exempt. The honest workaround is separate invoices per rate; forcing a mixed set through one rate produces a total that will not reconcile against your own tax return.

Nothing is stored, which cuts both ways

Everything runs in your browser: no upload, no account, and no copy of your client list on someone else's server. It also means closing the tab loses the invoice. Copy the output somewhere permanent as you go — and note that the one thing you cannot reconstruct afterwards is your own numbering sequence, so it is worth keeping that in a file rather than in your head.

The output is plain text, which is deliberately unglamorous and pastes cleanly into an email body or a document you print to PDF. Quotes come from the same panel with the wording changed, so an accepted quote becomes an invoice by switching tab and keeping the line items identical. Before you settle on a due date, the payment terms calculator shows what an early-payment discount actually costs to offer.