Free Carpentry 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: Interior door install — 3 prehung doors, hardware included), tax if it applies, any deposit already received, and your warranty terms. Beyond that, carpentry invoices carry a few things the generic list misses: the lumber species and grade you actually used (pressure-treated, cedar and clear pine can double a price between them), hardware as its own line, and per-door or per-room line items — trim work priced as one lump sum is the invoice a customer picks apart. Note the condition of what you worked into: an opening out of plumb, a floor out of level, framing you shimmed rather than rebuilt.

The callback is a door that latched fine the day you hung it and sticks by the first cold snap, or a mitered corner on crown that opens a hairline gap over the winter. The customer reads both as bad work.

What settles it is what you wrote down at the time. Note the opening you were handed: that the jamb was out of plumb, by how much, and that you shimmed and hung to the existing framing rather than reframing it, because a door hung true in a racked opening still swings itself open. Note the species, and that solid wood moves with the season, so a glued and filled joint can still telegraph.

If a return adjustment visit is part of the work, put it on the invoice and say what it covers, so the second trip is a line the customer already agreed to instead of an argument. Outdoors the same rule applies to checking, cupping and fastener pop in decking: name the material, say plainly that it is expected behaviour in that species, and say what maintenance the customer owns. Written on the day it is a specification. Said afterward it is an excuse.

Carpentry loses hours in the small things nobody writes down. The pickup trip for a customer-supplied slab or cabinet, and the second pickup when it turns up cracked. Pulling tack strip, moving furniture and lifting a floor register before baseboard goes on. Undercutting doors after somebody else's new flooring.

Scribing to a wall that is out by a quarter inch over eight feet, which is not the same job as cutting to a number. Blocking and shims that never made the takeoff. The dump run with an old deck or a kitchen's worth of cabinets on the trailer, and the fee at the gate. The measure visit and shop drawing before a built-in.

Caulk, fill and sand punch-out is its own trip and deserves its own line. On a deck or a header, the permit and the wait for the inspector are billable time too. So is the shop time nobody sees — milling stock, prefinishing, building a jig for one job — and the protection you put down and pick up every day you work inside somebody's finished house.

Photograph everything before it is covered. Sistered joists and the fastener pattern, the header and its jack studs, blocking behind drywall for a grab bar or a TV mount, with a tape in the shot so the spacing and the dimension read back later.

On a deck, shoot the ledger, its flashing and the bolt pattern before a single board goes down, and the footing before backfill. Those two photographs are the whole of a deck's safety story and they are exactly what an inspector, an insurer or a buyer's inspector will want. On rot repair, shoot the wood you cut out and how far it ran into the sill or the subfloor.

A year on, the customer wants to know where the blocking sits before they hang a cabinet, an inspector asks about ledger attachment and guard height, and an insurer on a tree impact or water claim wants the condition before you touched it. Shoot the certification label on a fire-rated door before it gets painted over, and record the species and treatment stamp on structural lumber, since that stamp is the only proof of what was actually installed.

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.