Invoice generator

What makes an invoice get paid

Most late payments are not disputes. They are friction — an invoice that reached the wrong person, arrived without a reference the finance system needed, or did not say clearly when payment was due.

The details that actually matter

• A unique invoice number. Sequential is fine. Many accounts-payable systems will not process an invoice without one, and duplicates cause rejections.
• An explicit due date, not just "net 30". A date removes the arithmetic and the ambiguity about when the clock started.
• The right recipient. At a company of any size, your day-to-day contact is usually not who pays. Ask early who invoices should go to, and copy both.
• A purchase order number if the client uses them. Without it, some systems will simply never pay you, and nobody will tell you why.
• Clear line items. "Consulting — $6,000" invites questions. "Website redesign, phase 2, 40 hours @ $150" does not.
• How to pay you, in the notes. Bank details, or a payment link.

Send it the day the work is done

Payment terms start when the invoice arrives, not when the work finished. A week's delay in sending is a week's delay in being paid, and it compounds if the client's payment run is monthly — miss the cutoff by a day and you wait another month.

On late payment

Chasing feels awkward and is entirely normal. A short, unapologetic email a few days after the due date resolves most cases, because the usual cause is that it was genuinely missed.

For larger engagements, the more effective lever is structural rather than confrontational: invoice in stages rather than at the end, or ask for a deposit before starting. A client who will not pay a deposit is telling you something useful early, while it is still cheap to learn.

Keep copies

Your invoices are your income records. Keep them — the general rule is three years from filing, longer in some circumstances. Save each PDF as you create it, because this tool stores nothing.

Which is the trade-off worth being explicit about: because everything happens in your browser and nothing is stored on a server, there is no account to log into and no archive to come back to. Save the file when you make it.

Invoicing is not tax

What you invoice is revenue. What you are taxed on is profit — revenue minus business expenses — and for self-employed people in the US that profit carries both income tax and self-employment tax.

If you are working out how much of each payment to set aside, the self-employment tax calculator gives you a percentage. If you are working out what to charge in the first place, the freelance rate calculator works backwards from the income you want to keep.