An Australian tax invoice is not a design question, it is a checklist. Get one field wrong and your customer cannot claim the GST credit, which is when you hear about it. Here is exactly what the ATO requires, what changes at $1,000, and the arithmetic for the GST line.
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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.
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.
| Field | Under $1,000 | $1,000 or more |
|---|---|---|
| The words "Tax invoice" | Required | Required |
| Seller's identity | Required | Required |
| Seller's ABN | Required | Required |
| Date issued | Required | Required |
| Description, quantity, price | Required | Required |
| GST amount or inclusive statement | Required | Required |
| Buyer's identity or ABN | Not required | Required |
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.
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.
A $250 job, GST added on top. Every required field is in here, in the order it would appear on the page — copy the left column into your template and the right column shows what belongs in it.
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Heading | Tax invoice |
| From | Sample Trading Pty Ltd |
| ABN | 12 345 678 901 |
| Invoice number | INV-0142 |
| Date issued | 8 September 2026 |
| Bill to | Customer name, and their ABN |
| Description | Site clean, 5 hours @ $50.00 |
| Subtotal | $250.00 |
| GST | $25.00 |
| Total | $275.00 |
| Due | 22 September 2026 (14 days) |
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.
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.
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.
Regentflow's invoice builder fills these fields for you, works out the GST line, and exports a PDF — so the checklist below is handled without you keeping a template file.