Free Invoice & Estimate Template (Word, Excel, PDF)

The purchase order number, the total against it, and often the line count, before anybody reads a description. An invoice that exceeds its order, or quotes one that closed at their fiscal year end, comes back whole rather than part paid, and you wait for the next payment run. Send one invoice per order and never one covering two, check what is left on the order first, and put your remit-to, the agreed terms and the vendor number they assigned you where a clerk finds them without a phone call. Address it to a person as well as a company; an invoice addressed to nobody in particular sits in a queue. Where submissions go through a portal, keep the confirmation number: it is the whole argument about whether the invoice was ever sent.

Either is normal, provided the line itself declares which. A pass-through reads at cost and carries the subcontractor's own invoice number beside it. A marked-up line reads as your service, at your figure, and shows none of their paperwork. What starts arguments is doing both at once — their invoice attached, a different number on the page. Either way the sub's paperwork is yours to keep: collect a W-9 from them before the first payment, and once the year's payments to an unincorporated sub pass the federal reporting threshold, a 1099-NEC follows after year end. That threshold is the IRS one and applies wherever you work. Name what the sub did on the line, not only that somebody else did it.

The ledger. One document sells the block — a retainer, a bank of hours, a period paid up front — and that is the only one carrying money. Every invoice after it lists the work performed, the hours drawn against the block and the hours still standing, and totals nothing due. Send them on the schedule you would send a real bill on, because that running record settles any later question about what the block bought, and a customer watching the balance fall renews without being chased. Two things belong in writing before the first hour comes off: whether unused hours roll into the next period or expire with it, and the rate that applies once the block is spent.

Yes, and the stages are agreed before the work starts, never proposed when the money runs short. Break the job into named stages, put a value on each, take a deposit against the first, then invoice using the same stage names the estimate used — an invoice whose stages do not match the estimate cannot be reconciled by anybody and sits. Each one says how much of that stage is finished and what earlier invoices already billed, so the running total is readable without digging out a file. Bill the last stage when the customer has what they were promised. If they hold back a portion of every payment until then, show that portion as a line of its own from the first invoice onward, so the final one releases a figure both of you have been watching.