Invoice Generator

What this tool does

CM8-13 turns a list of work or goods into a finished invoice you can print or save as a PDF, and keeps a register of what you have billed and what you are still owed. It is deliberately country-neutral: 44 currencies, four date formats, several number formats, tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive pricing, and a tax label you choose — VAT, GST, HST, PST, QST, Sales Tax, Service Tax or your own wording.

Everything happens inside this single file: no account, no upload, no network request of any kind, so your client list and revenue figures never leave the computer you are using. Nobody backs it up for you either — see Saving your work.

Two prints are available. Print invoice produces the client-facing document: your details, their details, the line items, the tax breakdown, how to pay and the amount due. Print business summary, on the Register tab, produces an internal page with the charts and the register — never send that one to a client. Both are rebuilt at the moment you print, so what you see is what comes out.

Numbering invoices

Almost every tax authority expects invoice numbers to be unique and to follow a sequence with no unexplained gaps. That is the whole rule; beyond it you have freedom.

• Simple sequential — INV-0001, INV-0002: easiest to defend and to sort. Set the prefix and digit count, then press “Use next number”.
• Year-based — 2026-014: makes the financial year obvious and lets the counter restart annually.
• Client-coded — ACME-014: convenient, but it creates several parallel sequences, and one continuous sequence is far easier to prove complete.

Never reuse a number after cancelling an invoice — issue a credit note and keep the original number alive — and never jump the sequence to look busier. The tool advances the next sequence automatically whenever you save a new invoice whose number matches your prefix.

Payment terms and due dates

The terms preset sets the due date: due on receipt, or net 7, 14, 30, 45 or 60 days from issue. Choose “Custom date” to type one directly — editing the due date by hand switches the preset to custom for you.

Shorter terms are paid sooner only if they were agreed before the work started. Net 30 is the usual default for business clients; large organisations often impose their own cycle regardless of what your invoice says. For new or small clients, due on receipt or net 7 is entirely normal, as is a deposit up front — record it in the Deposit / amount already paid field and the invoice shows the remaining balance.

State the consequence of late payment rather than leaving it implied: a monthly percentage, a fixed recovery fee, or suspension of work. Whether such a charge is enforceable depends on your contract and local law, but writing it down changes behaviour more often than it changes invoices.

Currency, number and date formats

Pick the currency the client is billed in; formatting uses your browser's own internationalisation data, so amounts carry the right symbol, grouping and number of decimals — including currencies with no minor unit, such as the yen, won and Chilean peso, which are rounded to whole units throughout.

Three controls fine-tune presentation. Number format switches between 1,234.56, 1.234,56, 1 234,56 and Indian lakh grouping. Symbol / code position forces the symbol in front, behind, or replaces it with the three-letter code — useful when a symbol is ambiguous, as with the several dollars. Date format offers ISO, day-first, month-first and “03 Aug 2026”; across borders, ISO or a spelled-out month removes any doubt about whether 08-03 is March or August.

One invoice carries one currency. If you bill in several, register totals and charts use whichever currency appears most often and tell you how many invoices were left out — converting currencies is a job for your accounts, not a guess by a calculator.

Tax-inclusive versus tax-exclusive pricing

Tax-exclusive means the unit prices you type are net and tax is added at the bottom: normal in the United States and Canada, and in business-to-business quoting almost everywhere. Tax-inclusive means the prices already contain the tax and the invoice works backwards to show how much is inside them: the norm in the UK, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and much of Asia when selling to consumers, where the advertised price must be the price paid.

At 20%, exclusive pricing on 100.00 gives 20.00 tax and 120.00 due; inclusive pricing on 100.00 gives a net of 83.33, tax of 16.67 and 100.00 due. Same rate, different answer — so agree which one your quoted price was before the invoice goes out.

VAT, GST and sales tax — the difference in plain language

VAT and GST are the same idea under different names, used in over 150 countries. Tax is charged at every step of the chain and a registered business reclaims the tax on its own purchases, so it only hands over tax on the value it added. Because the buyer reclaims it, the invoice must prove exactly what was charged: your registration number, the client's number on cross-border business sales, and a breakdown of tax per rate — which this tool builds automatically from the per-line rates.

Sales tax, as used in the United States, is charged once, at the final sale to a consumer, by state and often county and city on top. Businesses buying for resale present an exemption certificate instead of paying it. Rates depend on where the customer is and what is sold, and there is no reclaim mechanism, so the invoice needs the rate and amount but not the elaborate breakdown a VAT invoice needs.

Multiple tax lines exist because some places stack taxes: Canadian provinces combine federal GST with provincial PST or QST, and some jurisdictions add a levy on top. Use “Additional tax lines” for those and choose whether each is calculated on the net amount or on net plus the main tax.

Zero-rated and reverse charge. Tick that box when a sale carries no tax but must still be documented: exports, most cross-border business services inside the EU, and supplies where the buyer accounts for the tax. The invoice then shows zero tax plus your explanatory note — that note is not optional in most reverse-charge regimes, so make it say why no tax was charged.

Getting paid faster

• Invoice the day the work is accepted. Nothing recovers the days lost by waiting for month-end.
• Send it to the right place. A missing purchase-order number is the most common reason an invoice sits in a queue — there is a field for it.
• Make paying trivial. Full bank details, IBAN or routing information, or a payment handle in the payment block. Every question the client must ask costs you a week.
• Describe the work in their language. “Design work” invites a query; “Landing page design, 12 hours at the agreed rate, per PO 4471” gets approved.
• Take a deposit on large or first-time jobs and let the invoice show the balance.
• Chase early and politely — a short note the day after the due date, quoting the invoice number, settles most late payments before they become awkward.

What to keep for your records

Keep a copy of every invoice you issue, in sequence, with whatever proves the sale happened: the quote or contract, the purchase order, delivery notes or timesheets, and the bank entry showing payment. Most countries require these to be kept for somewhere between five and ten years and produced in readable form on request.

A workable routine: export the register to CSV each month for your bookkeeping, export a JSON backup at the same time, and save a PDF of each invoice as you print it, named with its number. Credit notes and cancelled invoices belong in the same file as the originals — an unexplained gap in a number sequence is exactly what an auditor asks about.

Using the register

“Save to register” stores the finished invoice with its total, currency and status. Status is entirely manual — draft, sent, paid or overdue — because this tool cannot see your bank account and will never pretend otherwise. Marking an invoice paid counts its full value as received; for part payments, record the amount in the deposit field and leave the status as sent, and the balance column shows what is left.

“Open” loads an entry back into the editor with the currency and tax settings it was saved with, so you can correct it and save again. The three charts all read from the register, so they are only as honest as the statuses you keep.

The Summary report header card sets the title and the closing notes printed on the business summary — a period name such as “Q3 receivables”, and any commentary your accountant or bookkeeper needs: disputed invoices, chasing actions, figures that will change. Both are saved with everything else and appear only on the summary, never on an invoice a client receives.

Saving your work

Your business details, the invoice being edited and the whole register are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Reset asks twice, then erases the in-memory data and every storage key this tool uses, returning it to a clean first run. There is no undo, so export first.

Accuracy and disclaimer

Calculations round to the currency's normal minor units at each stage, which is standard practice but can differ by a minor unit from a system that rounds only at the end. Where an invoice must match an accounting system exactly, check one against it before sending a batch. You remain responsible for the accuracy of everything on an invoice you issue.