How do I Create the Best Invoice Layout?

Has anyone ever worked at a store that kept extremely complicated invoice layouts? Have you ever thought that there had to be a way to make a better invoice layout?

When I was working at a bookstore they often had huge stacks of invoices for large shipments of books they were filling, usually for schools. Often the invoices forgot to list things like which edition the school requested, or it would be lost on another page as a notation.

I also could never figure out why they didn't put the books by title, as it would have been making your order much easier to check if things were alphabetical. They used some strange coding system for pretty much everything.

With my own small business to look after, finding the best invoice layout was really contingent on what we needed as our business grew. Over the years our invoices have actually changed as we started to need more space for additional details.

When we first started out our invoice was really simple, just a standard form we picked up at a business supply store. Later on we created custom invoices so that we would have room for our own coding system and any special notations we had to make. Having our own invoices custom made was a big step for us but made organization a lot easier.

@everetra - You don’t even have to go online if you’re looking for basic templates. For a free invoice template just open up Microsoft Word and they have a variety of sample templates for things like a billing invoice, a sales invoice or what have you.

@allenJo - You can find sample invoice template examples online if you’re looking for a basic layout to get you started. In my experience, most companies will need to customize their invoices to better display the information that they need to bill for.

In our business, we face a unique problem. We sell a software package that can be customized with various modules. A customer can buy the basic package, but they can buy some extra modules and other stuff.

So the long and short of it is that no two invoices ever look the same. This is quite a challenge for “static” invoices that are basically reports, which is what you would have in Microsoft Access.

Our invoices need to be generated dynamically. The computer program needs to create it on the fly, rather than just filling in the boxes of a static report. We had one of our developers build a custom invoicing application which the sales people use to deal with this problem and it seems to work for them.

@hamje322 - That sounds like hard work. In my company we sell goods, not services, so a basic sales invoice suffices for our purposes.

This has an item number, description, quantity, unit price and total. It’s very straightforward, and at the bottom of the page an applicable sales tax is applied.

You can roll out your own system for putting together such a report, using Microsoft Access or something like that, but we have our own sales and accounting software that we use.

As a software developer I once did some work for a local security company that needed a billing system developed.

It was a complete system with reports, invoices and data entry forms. The billing invoice was one of the trickiest parts of the template to get right.

The reason is that some of their customers billed monthly, some billed quarterly and some billed annually. There was a section on the invoice – down in the billing items portion – where I needed to display the actual months for which they were being billed.

So if they were being billed yearly, the invoice had to spell out all 12 months; the same principle goes for the quarterly. This took a lot of tweaking in the code, as most invoices are usually printed out to display a single line item for each billing payment amount; this required a little more flexibility, but I got it to work.