Invoice checklist for freelancers
An invoice that is missing a field does not fail loudly. It sits in the customer's accounts payable until someone notices, and then it comes back to you a month later with the payment still unmade. Here is what has to be on it.
Every tax invoice carries
- The words חשבונית מס, tax invoice, printed on the document.
- Your business name and your dealer number, מספר עוסק.
- A serial number from a sequence with no gaps.
- The issue date.
- The customer name, and their dealer number when they are a business.
- A description of what was sold, specific enough to identify it.
- The amount before VAT, the VAT amount and the rate, and the total.
- An allocation number, when the invoice is above the threshold that requires one.
An exempt dealer issues a different document. No VAT line, no tax invoice heading, and the wording that identifies the business as עוסק פטור. See the VAT guide for which status applies to you.
Invoice, receipt, or both
A tax invoice records the sale. A receipt, קבלה, records the money arriving. They are separate documents doing separate jobs, and the combined form, חשבונית מס קבלה, exists for the common case where both happen at the same moment.
The practical rule is about cash accounting. If you invoice on delivery and get paid 45 days later, those are two documents on two dates. If the customer pays on the spot, one combined document is correct and simpler.
Five mistakes that cost time
Numbering that skips
Sequences have to be unbroken per document type. A cancelled invoice does not free its number for reuse. If you issued 1044 by mistake, you issue a credit note against it, and the next invoice is 1045. Deleting the row and reusing the number is the version that causes trouble in an audit.
Editing after issue
An issued invoice is final. Wrong amount, wrong customer, wrong date, all of them are fixed by issuing a credit note and then a correct invoice. Spreadsheet based invoicing makes this easy to get wrong because nothing stops you from opening the file and changing a number.
Missing the customer dealer number
Business customers need it to claim their input VAT, and larger companies run automated checks that reject documents without it. Ask for it once when you set up the customer and store it.
A description that says services
One word does not identify what was sold. Write what a stranger reading the invoice in three years would need in order to know what happened. Consulting, October, 12 hours is a description. Services is a placeholder.
Sending a PDF you generated by hand
The document itself may look right, and the numbering, the archive and the allocation number are what fail. This is the gap between the generator on this site, which is fine for a quote or a proforma, and software that issues real fiscal documents.
Slate handles the numbering sequence, freezes each document at issue so it can never be edited, and requests allocation numbers where the law requires them. It is built for Israeli rules rather than translated into them.
Before you send
- Read the customer name and dealer number against their own paperwork, not your memory.
- Check that the total on the invoice matches the amount you agreed, including or excluding VAT as agreed.
- Confirm the date is the date of the transaction, not the date you got around to typing it.
- Send it to the person who pays, and copy the person who ordered.
General information, not tax advice. Confirm your own status and current thresholds with your accountant.