Free Painting 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 — 3 rooms, 2 coats, paint included), tax if it applies, any deposit already received, and your warranty terms. Beyond that, painting invoices carry a few things the generic list misses: the rooms or surfaces, the number of coats, the product brand and sheen, and the prep you did — the prep is most of the labor and the only part the customer cannot see once the furniture goes back. Write the color name and number with the base and the formula, list walls, ceilings and trim separately because they are rarely the same product, and note anything the customer asked you to leave out.

The dispute is about color, and it starts with a chip the size of a business card. They picked it under the store's lights, you rolled four walls of it, and with the furniture back and north light coming in it reads gray where they wanted greige. The other one is coverage. A customer who says this looks like one coat is usually looking at a flat sheen in raking light, where every lap and every patch shows no matter how many coats went on.

So write the finish down the way the can does: manufacturer, product line, color name and number, base and sheen, with walls, ceilings and trim listed separately, because they are rarely the same product. Say how many coats each of those surfaces got. Note that the color was approved from a sample painted on the wall rather than from a chip, and note any prep the customer asked you to leave out.

The failure that comes back later is adhesion, and it is nearly always the substrate rather than the paint. Chalked siding, a glossy oil finish under new latex, damp masonry, a wall that had been cleaned with the wrong thing. If you primed for it, write the primer down. If the customer declined the wash, the scrape or the primer, write that down too, in the same line as the surface it applies to, on the day you painted it.

The second trip. You finish, the customer moves the furniture back, finds four scuffs and a missed spot behind a door, and the punch list visit disappears into the original number.

Everything that comes off the wall first counts too: blinds, curtain rods, a mounted television, switch plates, the ceiling fan you dropped and rehung. Masking is the same kind of invisible. Plastic, floor paper and an afternoon taping off a kitchen before you spray cabinets is work whether or not anyone sees it afterward. Nail hole and anchor patching is a pass of its own, and so is shellac primer over water stains, smoke or a child's marker.

Outside, add the wash, the soft wood you dug out of a sill, and the ladder or lift time a stairwell or two-story foyer eats. Then disposal, which in most places means latex dried out and oil treated as household hazardous waste. Then the errands: the color the customer changed her mind about, the trip back to the store for a second five, and the touch-up kit you label and leave behind — which is worth doing and worth billing, because it is the thing they remember two years later.

Photograph the substrate before the first drop cloth goes down. Chalking siding, alligatored oil paint, failed caulk, mildew, nail pops and water stains are all things a customer forgets were ever there once the wall is one clean color, and peeling that turns up a year later becomes an argument about your paint instead of about what was under it. Shoot their floors and the furniture you moved, while you are at it.

Keep the can labels: the lot number and the tint formula on the lid are what a manufacturer wants on a product complaint and what lets anyone mix that color again. On exteriors write down surface temperature and how long the wood dried after washing, because almost every coating failure claim turns on conditions at application.

Leave the owner a color record by room with product, sheen and formula. That is what gets asked for when the house sells or a plumber opens a wall. On any pre-1978 house, keep your containment and cleanup photos with the job — the lead-safe rules are federal, they are documented rather than inspected, and the record you keep is the whole of your defence that the work was done the way the rule describes.

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.