Invoice & Quotation Builder

How to use the Invoice & Quotation Builder

1. Choose the document type first. A quotation goes out before the work, with a “valid until” date; an invoice goes out after, with a due date. Converting later is one click, but sending the wrong type is a real error — a client who receives an invoice for work they have not approved will quite reasonably refuse to pay it.
2. Fill in the issuer. The tool refuses to download a document without an “Issued by / Organization” name. Use your own legal or trading name, exactly as your clients know it, and add contact details so a payer can reach you without guessing.
3. Add one line per item or service. Describe each line so the client can recognise it without asking you: what it is, how many, at what rate. Vague lines (“services”, “miscellaneous”) are the commonest cause of payment delays, because they force the client to ask what they are paying for.
4. Set discount and tax as your own figures. The tool never suggests a tax rate. If you charge VAT, GST or sales tax, enter the rate that applies to you and name it in the notes. If you are not tax-registered, enter zero and say so in the notes rather than leaving the field ambiguous.
5. Check the preview against your own arithmetic. The preview prints the subtotal, discount, tax and total with the formulas beside them. For a first invoice, check one line by hand: quantity × rate, then the total. A tool that shows its formulas earns that check in seconds.
6. Download and send. The PDF is A4 vector text, selectable and searchable, suitable for emailing or printing. The PNG is an A4 page at 300 DPI (2480 × 3508 pixels) for messaging apps that handle images better than attachments. Keep a copy of every document you send, under its number, in your own records.

Worked example

The fictional sample is an invoice, INV-001, from Example Studio to Example Retail Ltd. It has two lines: one homepage design at $400, and two monthly content updates at $75 each, which is $150. The subtotal is therefore $550. A 5% discount is $27.50, leaving a discounted subtotal of $522.50. The document tax rate is 10%, which is $52.25, and the total is $574.75. In per-item mode the same lines would carry their own 10% rates: the discount spreads proportionally ($20.00 on the $400 line, $7.50 on the $150 line), and each line's tax is charged on its discounted amount, giving the same $52.25 here because both lines share the same rate — the modes differ only when lines genuinely carry different rates. Converting the sample to a quotation keeps the client, lines, discount and tax, and renumbers it as a quotation with a “valid until” date instead of a due date.

What this tool does, and what it deliberately does not

This tool builds clean, honest documents from your figures. It does not register a business, issue a tax number, verify that a client exists, or confirm that a price is fair. It does not store your clients, track who paid, send reminders, or keep a ledger — those are accounting jobs, and a document builder that pretended to do them would be a worse tool for both jobs.

On tax: the absence of a tax table is deliberate. Tax rules differ by country, region, product and registration status, and a table that guesses your situation would produce confident, wrong documents. Entering your own rate and naming it keeps responsibility where it belongs — with the person issuing the document — and the printed formula lets any accountant verify the arithmetic in a glance.

On misuse: the mandatory issuer field and the misuse notice exist because a realistic invoice is easy to abuse. A document made here carries no logo, seal, bank branding or verification mark, and it must never be presented as issued by someone else. If you receive a document that looks forged, report it through the contact page rather than paying it, and check with the supposed issuer through a channel you already trust.

Common errors, and the limits of this tool

The commonest error is sending a quotation labelled as an invoice, or an invoice with no due date — both create disputes that a clear label would have prevented. The second is a tax rate copied from another country's example: a 20% rate that belongs to one jurisdiction does not become correct by appearing on your document. The third is rounding drift: because the tool rounds each step to two decimals, a client adding unrounded lines may differ by a cent. That is normal bookkeeping behaviour, and the printed formulas exist so the cent can be explained rather than argued about.

The limits follow. There is no logo upload, no signature field, no multi-currency conversion (amounts stay in the currency you chose), and no automatic numbering sequence beyond the convert buttons' increment — if you need sequential numbering across many documents, keep your own register and type the next number yourself. The PNG is a rendered image of the document, not a second editable file; the PDF is the record copy. PDF text uses standard PDF fonts, so characters outside Latin-1 may show as a question mark — check the download before sending if your names use other scripts.

Frequently asked questions