What to include on your sales invoices

Your sales invoices are incredibly important – they form a legal demand for payment for goods or services rendered. As such, they must include certain key pieces of information.

The basics

1.    Your business name and billing address.
2.    Contact name, business name and address of the company being billed.
3.    A unique reference number that you and your customer can use to track the document.
4.    The date on which the invoice was raised.
5.    A breakdown of the products or services sold including unit prices and line totals.
6.    A grand total for the entire order.
7.    Your payment terms, including how you want to be paid (cheque, bank transfer, COD) and how long the customer has to pay.

VAT registered businesses

As well as the above information, VAT registered organisations need to include additional details on their sales invoices:

1.    Telephone numbers for your accounts contact.
2.    A company email address – again it should be for your accounts department.
3.    The customer’s purchase order number so that they can trace your invoice through their own accounts system.
4.    The amount of VAT charged, either on a line-by-line basis, or as a percentage of the invoice total.
5.    Your company’s VAT registration number.

Registered limited company

In addition to all of the above, invoices from registered companies need to display the following on their sales invoices:

1.    Your registered Company Number.
2.    Your full registered company address.

Fortunately you can create a template for your sales invoices that can be used over-and-over again – you just have to fill in the blanks. Accounting software like Xero will dramatically simplify this process.