What has to be on a tax invoice

The seven things every tax invoice needs

ATO: Tax invoices lists what a tax invoice has to contain. For a sale under $1,000, that is:

1. The words "tax invoice" — the document has to say what it is.
2. Your identity as the seller: your name or your trading name.
3. Your ABN.
4. The date you issued the invoice.
5. A description of what you sold, including quantity and price.
6. The GST amount, shown separately — or a statement that the total price includes GST where the GST is exactly one-eleventh of the total.
7. The extent to which each sale is taxable, so the customer can tell what they are entitled to claim.

For a sale of $1,000 or more including GST, add the buyer's identity or ABN. That is the whole difference between a small invoice and a large one — same seven items, plus the customer's details.

When one line is taxed and another is not

The seventh item is where most mistakes happen. If an invoice mixes taxable and GST-free items — a builder invoicing labour and some GST-free supplies, for example — the document has to make clear which lines are taxable and show the GST that applies to them. Simply adding 10% to the bottom line is wrong when part of the sale is GST-free or input-taxed, and it is the kind of error that surfaces a year later in an audit of your customer rather than of you.

Digital invoices, PDFs and eInvoicing

A tax invoice does not have to be paper. A PDF, a word-processor document or a generated file is valid as long as it carries all the required details, which is why the Tax invoice generator exists in the first place. business.gov.au: How to invoice covers the general invoicing rules, and ATO: Setting up your business invoices covers setting up the document itself — numbering, layout and what to keep. If you would rather start from a prepared document than a form, our templates are listed at our templates. A tax invoice template is not on sale yet.

The 28-day rule

You must give a customer a tax invoice within 28 days if they ask for one — unless the sale was $82.50 including GST or less, which is the one exception ATO: Tax invoices notes. In practice, most businesses issue it at the time of sale, and that is the habit to build: an invoice sent late is an invoice paid late. If a customer is claiming a GST credit on your sale, they need your tax invoice to do it — an invalid or missing one means the credit is delayed until you fix it.

If you are not registered for GST

Then you must not issue a document called a "tax invoice". You can issue an ordinary invoice with your details and the amount owed, and it is perfectly valid as a request for payment — but not as a tax invoice, because there is no GST on your sales to separately identify. Using the words anyway is a common and avoidable mistake, particularly when a business reuses a template from a previous GST-registered venture.

Keep a copy for five years

Every tax invoice you issue and every one you receive has to be kept for five years. Electronic copies are fine, so a folder of PDFs is a legitimate record-keeping system — the requirement is that the records exist, are readable, and can be produced if asked. The detail is in How long do I have to keep business records?.

Five mistakes that make an invoice invalid

• No ABN, or an ABN that belongs to someone else — the first thing a business customer checks.
• No separate GST amount on a taxable sale, leaving the customer to guess how much of the total was GST.
• Missing "tax invoice" — an invoice titled only "Invoice" does not meet the requirement for a taxable sale.
• A mixed invoice with one blended GST figure, so no one can tell which lines were taxable.
• A sale of $1,000 or more without the buyer's identity or ABN.

None of these are hard to fix before the invoice goes out. All of them are awkward to fix after — because fixing it means asking the customer to tear up a document they have already entered into their own books.

If you are not sure whether you should be registered for GST at all, start with How to register for GST in Australia; the invoicing rules follow from the registration, not the other way round.