Free Invoice Generator

How to create an invoice PDF

1. Enter your details and your customer's. Add your business name and address under From, and the customer's under Bill To. Only the two names are required. Your logo, address, email address, phone number, and the tax identifier — your EIN on the business side, the customer's TIN on theirs — are all optional, and are simply left off the PDF when blank.
2. Add your line items. Give each item a description, a quantity, and a rate. The amount for each line and the running subtotal update as you type. Add a tax rate, a percentage or flat discount, shipping, and any amount already paid.
3. Preview, then download. Press Preview to see the finished invoice without saving it, and download straight from that view when it looks right. The preview is the real PDF rather than an approximation of it, so nothing changes between what you check and what your customer receives. Signed out, nothing is kept, so save the file — reloading the page starts a blank invoice. Signed in, downloading also files the invoice in your account history.

What goes on the invoice

An invoice is a request for payment, and it only works if the person receiving it can act on it without asking you a question first. The layout here covers what that takes.

• An invoice number and dates.A unique number is what lets both sides refer to the same document later. The issue date and due date together are what make “overdue” mean something.
• Both parties.Your name and address, and the customer's. Email address and phone number are optional but worth adding — they are how a query about the invoice reaches you instead of stalling.
• Your logo, if you have one. A PNG or JPEG up to 2MB prints above the heading and is scaled to fit, so a wide wordmark and a square mark both sit correctly. It is the one element that makes an invoice look like it came from you rather than from a template.
• Tax identifiers, where they matter. The business side takes an optional EIN, formatted as you type; the customer side takes an optional TIN, which is left as free text because a TIN may be an SSN, an ITIN, or an EIN, and each is punctuated differently. Neither is required, and a blank one prints nothing at all.
• Itemized charges. Each line gets a description, a quantity, and a rate. Itemizing is what turns a disputed total into a conversation about one line.
• Tax, discount, and the balance due. Tax is applied after any discount, shipping is added on top, and anything already paid is subtracted — so the figure at the bottom is the amount actually owed today.

Notes and payment terms are free text at the foot of the page. Terms are the more useful of the two: stating how you want to be paid, and by when, is what makes a due date enforceable rather than decorative.

What we keep, and when

Signed out, nothing is kept. The values go to our server, get rendered into a PDF, and are gone when the response finishes — no database record, no copy on disk, nothing tied to an account. The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: the PDF you download is the only copy, so save it somewhere you will find it again.

Signed in, downloading files the invoice in your account, where you can reopen it, change a figure, and print a corrected copy without rebuilding it. Saving keys on the invoice number, so correcting INV-0001 updates that invoice rather than leaving two versions of it in your history. Nothing is saved by previewing, and nothing is saved until you actually download.

One field is treated differently either way. A customer's tax identifier may be a Social Security number, so the form accepts only its last four digits and only those four are ever stored — enough to identify the number to someone who already knows it, useless to anyone who does not. Your own EIN is a business identifier that belongs on the face of an invoice, so it is kept whole.

Invoices, pay stubs, and which one you need

The two documents get confused often enough to be worth separating. An invoice asks a client to pay you: it goes out before the money arrives, and it is what a freelancer or contractor sends. A pay stub records a payment already made to an employee, breaking gross pay down into tax withheld, deductions, and net pay.

If you are billing a client, this page is the one you want. If you are paying someone — or you need proof of your own income — the pay stub generator handles federal and state withholding automatically, with state-by-state rules and pay-per-stub pricing. The resource guides cover the payroll side in more depth.

Frequently asked questions