Free Excavation 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: Driveway grading & gravel — 120 ft, material included), tax if it applies, any deposit already received, and your warranty terms. Beyond that, excavation invoices carry a few things the generic list misses: cubic yards moved, material hauled in or out with the ticket count, compaction if it was specified, and your 811 ticket number — the ticket number is the line that proves you located utilities before the bucket went in the ground. Add whether the trench was backfilled in lifts or left to settle, and the depth and route of anything you buried, measured off something permanent.

The call comes in April, not the week you finish. The trench line over the new water service has sunk two inches, there is a puddle sitting where the spoils pile was, and the customer wants to know why you left it that way. Settlement over backfill is normal ground behavior, and it is also the argument you lose if the invoice says nothing about it.

Write down whether the trench was compacted in lifts, track-walked, or left to settle on its own, and say plainly that a top-off pass on a settled line is separate work.

The other call is a strike somebody else made that lands on you. Your 811 ticket number, the date you called it, and a line noting that private lines past the meter are not covered by the public locate will end that conversation before it turns into a claim. The third is drainage: you regraded, the next storm put water somewhere the owner did not expect, and grading is the easiest work in the world to blame. Record the grades you left and any existing drainage condition you found, before the first rain rather than after it.

Mobilization gets billed one direction and eaten the other. The machine has to come home, and the trailer trip back burns the same fuel and the same hour of your day as the trip out.

Standby is the next one. Sitting on the excavator while the plumber hunts for fittings, or waiting on an inspector before you can backfill, is time the ground did not move and you could not be anywhere else. Then disposal, which is three lines and not one: tipping at the pit for spoils, the recycler for broken concrete, and the clean fill you had to haul back in because the native soil would not compact.

Hand digging inside the tolerance zone around a marked line, potholing to find a lateral, the silt fence and rock construction entrance the permit required, and washing the machine down before it moves all get done and rarely get written. So does the restoration at the end — raking, topsoil, seed and straw over a trench line — which the customer remembers as the whole job because it is the only part they ever see.

Photograph the locate marks before the bucket goes in the ground, with enough of the house or driveway in frame to place them. Shoot the open trench with a tape or a grade rod standing in it so the depth reads in the picture, and get the bedding, the pipe, the tracer wire and the warning tape before any of it is covered. Once it is backfilled none of that can be shown again without digging it back up.

Take swing ties too: two measurements from something permanent, a foundation corner or a well casing, to the tank lids, the distribution box, and each end of the run. Add a photo of the lawn and the driveway apron as you found them, ruts and cracks included.

Photograph your trench protection as well — the box, the shoring, the slope you cut — because that is a federal safety obligation and the only record that it was done is the one you keep. A year on, a fence crew puts a post through the lateral, the county asks where the lids are, or somebody wants to know who cracked the concrete.

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.