Free Invoice Generator

An invoice lands in a shared mailbox and becomes a row in a payables system you cannot see, keyed by a clerk or read by software. The fields that decide what happens next are the legal entity being billed, which has to match their vendor record, the reference they match spend against, and the payment instructions. This form gives you the first, because you type the client name yourself. It has no purchase order field and no bank details field, so the other two travel in the line item text or in the covering email, and an invoice that arrives without either waits for somebody to ask.

A due date on the document is a claim, and where it is missing the buyer calendar decides instead. Inside the EU there is a floor under that claim. Directive 2011/7/EU, still the framework in force in 2026 after the proposed replacement regulation was dropped, sets 30 days as the default for business to business payment, permits longer where the parties expressly agree and the term is not grossly unfair to the creditor, and attaches statutory interest at the ECB reference rate plus at least eight percentage points, with EUR 40 of fixed recovery compensation for each late invoice. Say the reference rate stands at 2%: on a EUR 6,000 invoice paid 41 days late, that is EUR 67 of interest and EUR 40 beside it.

The expensive failure is the correction. An invoice number is a sequence, and Article 226(2) of the VAT Directive asks for a number that uniquely identifies the document within its series, so a wrong amount on invoice 0042 is answered by a credit note against it and a new 0043. Editing the PDF and resending leaves two documents sharing one number, one of which the client has already booked. The browser here remembers your own details and your saved client list, and it keeps no record of the invoices themselves, so the sequence is yours to hold.