Receipt and Invoice Maker

What this document is and what it is not

It is a piece of paper that says who sold what to whom, for how much, on what date. That is the whole job. A receipt records that money already changed hands. An invoice asks for money that has not arrived yet. The difference matters more than the layout does, because a customer who receives something headed RECEIPT reasonably concludes they are square with you, and one who receives an INVOICE knows they still owe. Pick the right one at the top and half the confusion never happens.

What it is not is your bookkeeping. Printing this does not record a sale anywhere, does not file anything, and does not track what you have collected in sales tax. If you collect tax you have a return to file on a schedule your state sets, and the numbers on that return come from your books, not from a stack of printed receipts. Treat these as the customer-facing half of a transaction you also record somewhere durable.

Line items

One item per line, with vertical bars between the columns: Description | Qty | Unit price. If a line has only two columns it reads as Description | Amount at a quantity of one, which is what you want for a delivery charge, a trip fee or a flat rate where a quantity would be meaningless. Prices can carry a dollar sign and commas — 1,250.00 and $1250 read the same. Quantities can be fractional, so 2.5 hours at 85.00 works and lands at 212.50.

Columns can be separated by tabs instead of bars, which means you can select three columns in a spreadsheet, copy, and paste the block straight in. If a line has letters where a number should be, that line is skipped and listed underneath, so you see what was dropped instead of quietly getting a wrong total.

Sales tax, and why there is no default rate

There is no national sales tax rate in the United States. States set rates, and then counties, cities and special districts stack on top, so two addresses fifteen minutes apart can carry different totals. Several states have no sales tax at all. Whether a particular thing you sell is taxable is a separate question again — labor, delivery, food and installation are treated differently from state to state, and sometimes differently depending on whether they are billed separately from the goods.

So the rate is a field you fill in, not something guessed for you. Look up the combined rate for the address the sale is sourced to, and check whether what you are selling is taxable before you charge tax on it. If the sale is exempt, choose No tax on this sale rather than entering 0% — the document then says tax was not charged instead of showing a zero line that reads like an error.

How the cents work out

Every amount is held as a whole number of cents from the moment it is read. Each line amount is quantity times unit price, rounded to the cent once, right there. The subtotal is the sum of those rounded line amounts, so the column you can see adds up to the figure printed under it. The discount comes off the subtotal, and tax is charged on what is left, which is the ordinary order: discount first, then tax on the discounted amount.

Tax is a single rounding — the taxable amount times the rate, to the nearest cent. Take a $100.00 subtotal at 8.375%. The exact tax is $8.3750, which is not an amount that exists. It rounds up to $8.38 and the total is $108.38. The half cent went up, and nothing else absorbs it.

Tax-inclusive prices run the other way, and there the stray cent has to live somewhere specific. If you charged $108.38 including 8.375% tax, the taxable amount is $108.38 divided by 1.08375, which is $100.0046 — call it $100.00. The tax is then set to the total minus that: $8.38. Deriving tax as the remainder rather than calculating it independently is deliberate, because it guarantees the two lines add back to the amount you actually took. Rounding both independently produces documents where the parts do not equal the whole, which is exactly the sort of thing a customer notices and nobody can explain a year later.

Terms, invoice numbers and the remit-to block

Net 30 means the full amount is due thirty days from the invoice date. Net 15 and Due on receipt are the same idea at other lengths. The due date is worked out from the date on the document and printed beside the terms, so nobody has to count. Shorter terms get paid sooner in practice, though if you are dealing with a company that runs check runs twice a month, Net 15 and Net 30 often land on the same day anyway.

Number every invoice. It does not have to be clever — a year and a running count is enough. The number is how a customer references the payment they just sent and how you find the document again when a bank line item is all you have to go on.

The remit-to block is the part most often left out and most often the reason an invoice sits for six weeks. Say who the check is made out to, where it goes, and what the alternative is if they would rather not mail one. If you take ACH or card, say so. An invoice that does not tell someone how to pay it is asking them to do work before they can give you money.

Two copies, and what happens to what you typed

With two copies turned on you get the same document twice, one marked business copy and one marked customer copy, on separate sheets. For a cash sale that is the practical setup: sign both, hand one over, keep one. Turn it off for a single sheet, which is what you want when you are emailing a PDF instead of handing over paper.

All of this runs in the browser on your machine. The customer names, the prices and the addresses are not uploaded anywhere and are not saved between visits — reload the page and the fields are back to their defaults. So before you navigate away, print the document or copy the text version out. If you invoice the same customer often, keeping the line-item block in a note and pasting it back in beats retyping it.

Questions people ask