How to create an invoice that gets paid.

What every invoice must contain

Requirements vary a little by country, but this list satisfies almost every jurisdiction and every accountant:

• The word "Invoice" — so it is not mistaken for a quote or a receipt.
• A unique invoice number, sequential and never repeated.
• Your business name, address and contact details, plus company or tax registration numbers where you have them.
• The client's name and address — the legal entity, not just the person you dealt with.
• Issue date and a specific due date.
• A line for each item: description, quantity, unit price, line total.
• Subtotal, any tax with its rate shown separately, and the total due.
• Payment details and accepted methods.

If you are registered for VAT or GST, the tax must appear as its own line with the rate stated — a total that silently includes tax is not a compliant invoice. The VAT calculator handles the arithmetic in both directions.

The numbering rule people break

Invoice numbers must be unique and unbroken. INV-0001, INV-0002, INV-0003. No gaps, no reuse.

This is not bureaucratic fussiness — in most jurisdictions it is a legal requirement, because an unbroken sequence is what lets anyone verify that no invoice has been quietly removed from the record. The common mistake is generating a number by counting existing invoices: delete one and the next invoice reuses a number already issued.

Why "payment within 30 days" gets paid late

Relative terms create an argument about when the clock started. "Due 14 March" does not.

A dated invoice enters an accounts-payable system with an unambiguous position in the queue; a relative one has to be interpreted first, and interpretation takes time it will not be given. State the date. If you have late-payment terms or statutory interest rights, state those too — quietly and factually, on every invoice, not only the overdue ones.

Small things that measurably speed up payment

• Send it immediately. The correlation between how fast you invoice and how fast you are paid is strong and consistent.
• Address it to the right place. Ask for the accounts email; invoices sent to your day-to-day contact wait for them to forward it.
• Include a purchase order number if the client uses them. Missing PO numbers are a leading cause of invoices sitting unpaid and unqueried.
• Describe the work as they understood it. "Homepage redesign — 3 rounds of revisions" gets approved; internal shorthand gets forwarded to someone who does not recognise it.
• Put bank details on the invoice. Not in the email body — the invoice is the document that gets filed and paid from.

Creating one in about two minutes

You do not need software or a subscription for this. Our free invoice generator runs entirely in your browser: fill in the fields, watch it build, save the PDF. No sign-up, no watermark, no limit, and nothing you type is uploaded anywhere.

The trade-off is that nothing is stored — refresh the page and it is gone, which is exactly right for an occasional invoice and wrong if you are sending them weekly. At that point you want numbering that continues by itself, saved clients and a payment history, which is what invoicing inside an AWGCOR account does.

What to do when it goes unpaid

1. Day 1 after due. A short, friendly email with the invoice attached again. Assume it was missed, because it usually was.
2. Day 7. Phone the accounts contact. One call resolves more overdue invoices than any number of emails.
3. Day 14. A formal reminder in writing, referencing your payment terms and any statutory interest.
4. Day 30. A final notice with a deadline and a stated next step.

Keep every step unemotional and in writing. Most late payment is disorganisation rather than refusal, and a calm paper trail is both more effective and more useful if it ever does escalate.