Invoice Generator

Most people arriving here want one of two quite different things. Either a clean document that tells a client what they owe — in which case almost any layout works, and the only real requirements are that it is legible and the arithmetic is right. Or a tax invoice under GST, which is a legally defined document with a list of fields that must be present. The second is the one that gets rejected, and usually not by the client: it gets rejected months later when the client's accountant cannot claim input tax credit against it.

The fields that trip people up are rarely the obvious ones. Nobody forgets the amount. What goes missing is the HSN or SAC code per line, the place of supply, the GSTIN of both parties, and a tax breakdown split by head rather than one merged "Tax 18%" row. This tool now has inputs for all of those, and it tells you which are still blank rather than exporting a document that looks finished and is not. The warning is advisory — if you are not registered under GST, a plain bill is exactly what you want and none of this applies to you.

This is the most common situation among freelancers and it is the one most invoice templates handle badly — including, until this revision, ours. If your turnover is below the registration threshold you have no GSTIN, and Section 32 of the CGST Act is explicit that a person who is not registered shall not collect any tax. The threshold is ₹20 lakh of aggregate turnover for services in most states, and ₹40 lakh for goods in the states that opted for the higher limit, with ₹10 lakh and ₹20 lakh respectively in the special-category states.

The document you issue is a Bill of Supply, not a tax invoice. It has no tax line, no CGST/SGST split, no place of supply and no HSN requirement — it is simply what you sold and what it costs. Select it as the document type above and the tax is removed from the arithmetic and the heading changes, because a document titled "Tax Invoice" that charges no tax is the wrong document.

The failure mode worth naming: adding 18% because a template put it there by default. On a ₹50,000 project that is ₹9,000 collected from a client with no legal basis and no return to remit it on. Your client cannot claim credit for it either, since there is no GSTIN behind it, so they will eventually ask. The tool now blocks that quietly — if the tax field is above zero and no GSTIN appears in your details, it says so in red rather than exporting the document.

Composition dealers are the third case. They are registered and do have a GSTIN, but they pay a flat percentage of turnover instead of charging tax on invoices, so they are equally barred from collecting it. Rule 49 additionally requires the words "Composition taxable person, not eligible to collect tax on supplies" at the top of every Bill of Supply they issue, which the third document-type option prints for you.

One thing to check before you conclude you are exempt: registration can be compulsory below the threshold in some circumstances, inter-state supply of goods being the usual one. If your turnover is anywhere near the limit, it is worth confirming rather than assuming.

This generator subtracts the discount from the subtotal and then charges tax on what remains. That is not a stylistic choice. Section 15(3) of the CGST Act allows a discount to be excluded from the taxable value when it is shown on the invoice at the time of supply — so a discount recorded on the face of the invoice reduces the tax, and one given afterwards generally does not.

On a ₹50,000 subtotal with a ₹5,000 discount at 18%, taxing after the discount gives ₹8,100 of GST and a ₹53,100 total. Taxing before it gives ₹9,000 and ₹54,000 — ₹900 more, collected from your client for no reason and remitted by you. The gap is exactly 18% of the discount, so it scales with both.

A post-supply discount is a different instrument. It needs a credit note, and the credit note has its own timing rules, which is why "just knock something off the next invoice" creates reconciliation work that a discount line here does not.

Until this revision the PDF was single-page, and the loop that drew line items stopped once it ran out of vertical room — while the totals kept counting every item. An invoice with thirty lines exported a document showing roughly twenty of them and a total that did not match the rows above it, which is the worst possible failure for a billing document: it looks complete. It now continues onto as many pages as the items need, repeating the column headers, and keeps the totals block whole rather than splitting it across a page break.

Long descriptions are truncated to fit the description column rather than overlapping the HSN code beside them. If your item text is being cut, put the detail in the notes field at the bottom, which wraps properly.

The amount in words uses the Indian lakh and crore scale, not thousands and millions, because that is what a bank cross-checking a payment against an Indian invoice expects to read. What this page cannot tell you is whether the rate you entered is the right one for what you sold — that depends on your HSN classification, and the tool takes whatever number you give it. Nothing here is tax advice, and none of what you type is sent to ToolMintX.