Free Auto Detailing Invoice Generator

No app, and no account for your first two documents — build them, print them, send them, nothing to sign up for. An estimate counts the same as an invoice. Once you've used those two, unlimited documents are $8.99/month and that's when you'd create an account. Your invoice contents never leave your device either way.

Tap “Send as PDF” and your phone's own share sheet opens with the finished invoice attached — pick Messages, Mail, WhatsApp, whatever you use, and the customer is already in your contacts, so there's nothing to type. “Send via SMS” sends it as a picture instead, which previews right inside the message thread. Either way the amount due, your payment instructions and your payment link travel in the message, and the file is built on your phone — it never passes through us.

Put your payment link or handle in “Get paid online” and every invoice gets a scan-to-pay code: your customer points their phone camera at it and their payment app opens, already pointed at you. Three ways in, because customers read invoices in different places — scan the code off a printed copy, tap the code itself in the PDF (a phone can't photograph its own screen, so on a phone the tap is the one that works), or tap the link in the message you sent. The money moves directly between your customer and your own payment account — we are not a payment processor, we never touch it, and we never see whether you were paid.

Your company name and license number, the customer's name and service address, itemized work (for example: Full detail — interior shampoo, clay bar, sealant), tax if it applies, any deposit already received, and your warranty terms. Beyond that, auto detailing invoices carry a few things the generic list misses: the vehicle's year, make, model and plate or VIN, and the condition you found it in — existing scratches, chips or interior damage noted before you start is the single thing that protects a detailer from a claim afterwards. Name the stage of correction you performed and what it does not remove, and record the coating or sealant by product with the number of layers, because that is what any warranty on it rests on.

The argument in this trade is almost always about what the customer expected the paint to look like. You run a one-step polish, the car looks perfect under shop lights, and a week later they stand in front of it in direct sun, find the deep scratches still in the hood and decide you did not do the work.

Put the stage on the invoice: one-step, two-step or multi-stage, what it takes out and what it leaves. Write that a scratch through the clear coat cannot be polished out without cutting deeper than the paint safely allows, and write your gauge readings if you took them.

The interior version is the stain that comes back. Extraction pulls soil up out of the padding as the carpet dries, so note that a spot can reappear over the next day or two and that a return visit is a spot correction, not a second interior. Odour is the same shape: smoke, milk or a pet accident in the padding or the vents comes back with humidity, and the honest line says what was treated, what was not removable, and what replacing it would take.

Pet hair is the big one. A car described on the phone as needing a vacuum turns into two hours with a rubber brush and a pumice block on the rear bench, and it still goes out billed as an interior clean. Child seats are the same story, because you cannot clean under one without pulling it and you should not hand it back uninstalled.

Then the mobile costs: the miles, the wait when the vehicle is not where they said it would be or the keys are at another desk, and the driveways with no spigot and no outlet, where you run off your own tank and generator.

Ozone and vent fogging hold a bay while the machine runs and the car airs out. Heavy soil brings gloves, a suit, bagged waste and towels you will throw away rather than wash. Decal and adhesive work only shows up after the wash. So does the engine bay somebody assumed was included, the headlight restoration they ask about while you are packing up, and the extra hour on a three-row SUV or a lifted truck that was booked as a car.

Shoot a slow walkaround video before you touch the car, in daylight or under a light you can actually see swirls in, and get the wheels, the lower doors, the bumper corners and the glass. Curb rash and rock chips you did not photograph become damage you caused.

Photograph the interior in the same pass, including the console and anything the owner left in it, because a missing item after a clean-out is a claim you cannot answer a month later. Log the odometer and the plate. If you gauge paint, keep the readings by panel, since a thin panel is a respray and that is what you point at when someone asks why you refused to cut further.

On a coating, record the product, the number of layers, the date and the shop conditions it cured in, then log every maintenance wash and annual inspection, because the manufacturer's warranty rests on that record. Keep the before and after under the same light and from the same spot — a correction photographed under two different lights proves nothing to anybody, including you.

Start with a different question: is the job taxable at all? In most states, work that improves real property — a new install, a remodel, an addition — makes you the end user of the materials. You paid sales tax at the supply house and you don't add tax to the customer's invoice. Repairs and maintenance are taxable far more often, and some states treat residential and commercial work differently. If tax does apply, the rate is the one at the job's service address: only a handful of states are a single statewide rate, and everywhere else counties and cities add on top of the state share. Tap “Sales tax — is this taxable, and what’s the rate here?” under the tax field, pick your state, and we'll show you the state rate and link you straight to your revenue department's own guidance. And there's no federal sales tax — your federal tax is income and self-employment tax, which you settle with the IRS, not something you collect from a customer. When no tax applies, leave the rate at 0.