What to Include on an Invoice: The Complete Checklist

Your business details (the seller block)

Every invoice must say who is asking for the money. Include your legal business name, your trading name if you use one ("Studio North, trading as…"), a postal address, an email address and a phone number. If you are tax-registered, your VAT, GST or tax registration number is not decoration — in most jurisdictions a tax invoice is legally incomplete without it, and corporate clients will reject invoices that omit it.

Use the same details everywhere. The name on the invoice should match the name on your bank account and your contract. When a finance team verifies a new payee, mismatched names are the most common reason a first payment gets stuck in "pending checks" for a fortnight.

• Legal business name (and trading name, if different).
• Postal address, email, phone.
• Tax registration number, if you are registered.
• Your logo — optional, but it makes the document instantly recognisable.

Your client’s details (the buyer block)

Bill the entity, not the person. Your contact might be "Sara from marketing", but payment is authorised by a company, so the invoice should carry the company’s full legal name and its billing address — which is sometimes a different office from where the work was delivered. Add "Attn: Sara Ahmed, Marketing" underneath so the document reaches the human who can approve it.

If the client issued a purchase order, its number belongs in this block in a clearly labelled field of its own: "PO number: PO-88123". Many companies operate a strict "no PO, no pay" policy, and an invoice missing the number is returned unpaid no matter how perfect everything else is. Ask for the PO number when the work is agreed, not when you sit down to invoice.

Number, dates and the document’s identity

Three identifiers make an invoice trackable: a unique invoice number, the issue date and the due date. The number is your reference in every email, statement and phone call about this bill — keep a single unbroken sequence for your whole business, and never recycle a number from a cancelled invoice. Pair it with the actual calendar due date ("Due 2 December 2026"), not just the terms.

For recurring or staged work, add one more line: the period the invoice covers ("Services for November 2026" or "Milestone 2 of 3"). It costs you one line and saves the client’s accountant a reconciliation headache at month-end — the kind of small courtesy that quietly moves your invoice to the front of the approval queue.

Line items that describe value

Each line needs four things: what was supplied, how many, at what unit price, and the line total. "1 × Project fee" fails the test; "1 × Brand identity package (logo suite + guidelines), fixed fee as quoted 5 October" passes it. For time-based work, give the rate and the quantity — "14 hours × 60 = 840" — and, if the client will want it, the dates the hours were worked.

One line per deliverable is usually right. Bundling everything into a single line hides the value you delivered; exploding a simple job into twenty micro-lines looks like padding. And if different items carry different tax rates, group them so each tax treatment is visible — your client has to reclaim or report that tax correctly too.

Totals, tax and payment instructions

The money block, in order: subtotal, discount, delivery or expenses, tax with its name and rate shown as a separate line, grand total, any amount already paid, and the balance due in the largest type on the page. If your country or your client expects the total in words as well as figures — standard on cheques and common on formal invoices in South Asia and the Middle East — include it; a mismatch between words and figures is a classic reason banks query documents.

Finally, the part too many invoices forget: how to actually pay. Bank name, account title, account number or IBAN, and the reference to quote (your invoice number). Add a payment link or QR code if you have one. Then a single line of terms — "Payable within 14 days. Queries within 7 days, please." — so the expectations are printed on the document itself, not buried in an old email thread.

• Subtotal → discount → shipping/expenses → tax → total → paid → balance due.
• Tax shown by name and rate (e.g. "GST 18%") as its own line.
• Full payment details, plus the reference the client should quote.
• One line of terms: the due date and where to send queries.

The 60-second final check

Before sending, read the invoice as if you were the stranger in accounts who has never heard of you. Can they tell who you are, what you did, what it costs, when it is due and how to pay — without opening another document? If yes, send it. Templates help here: in this invoice generator, your seller block, tax defaults and payment details are saved in your profile and pre-filled on every invoice, and the client block comes from your address book, so the checklist above becomes the default rather than a chore.