Tax invoice template for Australia — what has to be on it

The seven things a tax invoice must show

For a sale of less than $1,000 (GST-inclusive), the ATO requires a tax invoice to contain seven pieces of information. This is the list to check your template against — not the layout, not the logo, these seven.

• That the document is intended to be a tax invoice — in practice, the words "Tax invoice".
• The seller's identity — your business or trading name.
• The seller's ABN.
• The date the invoice was issued.
• A brief description of the items sold, including the quantity and the price.
• The GST amount payable — either shown separately, or, where GST is exactly one eleventh of the total, a statement such as "Total price includes GST".
• The extent to which each sale on the invoice includes GST — which matters when some lines are taxable and others are not.

What changes at $1,000

Once the sale is $1,000 or more (GST-inclusive), one more field becomes mandatory: the buyer's identity or the buyer's ABN.

The practical advice is to put the customer's name and ABN on every invoice regardless of value. It costs nothing, it removes a threshold you have to remember, and a template with a field that is sometimes blank is a template someone will forget to fill in on the one invoice where it counts.

Working out the GST

GST in Australia is 10%. That gives two bits of arithmetic worth committing to memory, because getting them backwards is the most common invoice error there is.

• GST-exclusive price → total: multiply by 1.1. $100 becomes $110.
• GST-inclusive total → the GST inside it: divide by 11. $110 contains $10 of GST.
• GST-inclusive total → the pre-GST amount: divide by 1.1. $110 was $100.

Not registered for GST? It is not a tax invoice

If you are not registered for GST you must not issue a document that says "tax invoice", and you must not charge or show a GST amount. Head the document "Invoice" instead, and leave the GST line off entirely.

You still show your ABN. Without an ABN on the invoice, a business customer may be required to withhold tax from the payment at the top rate — so the missing field costs you real money, not just tidiness.

Fields the ATO does not require but you want anyway

None of these are legal requirements. All of them are the difference between an invoice that gets paid and one that sits in a pile.

• An invoice number — sequential and unique. This is how you and your customer both refer to it, and how you find it again.
• Payment terms in words, not implication — "Due 14 days from issue: 7 September 2026". A due date gets paid sooner than "net 14".
• Bank details, in full, including the account name. A BSB and number with no account name gets a phone call.
• A purchase order or job reference if the customer uses one. Invoices without a PO number are the ones that stall in accounts payable.
• Your contact details, so a query becomes an email rather than a non-payment.

How long to keep them

Keep records that explain your transactions, including invoices, for five years from when you prepared or obtained them, or five years from when the transaction was completed — whichever is later. They need to be in English and readable.

A folder of PDFs named by invoice number satisfies this comfortably. What does not is a spreadsheet you overwrite each time, or invoices that only exist in an account you might stop paying for.

Check your template against this

Before you use any downloaded template — including ours — run it against the list above once. Most free templates on the internet are American: they have a "Sales Tax" line and no ABN field, which makes them useless here.

• Does it say "Tax invoice" at the top, and are you actually registered for GST?
• Is there an ABN field, and is your ABN in it?
• Is there a GST line, or the inclusive statement?
• Is there a field for the customer's name and ABN?
• Is there a unique invoice number and a real due date?