About Billwise

Why Billwise exists

Sending an invoice should take a minute. Too many free invoice tools ask for an account before the download, load pages full of ads, or keep your client list on their servers. We wanted the opposite: open the page, fill in the form, get a clean PDF.

Billwise runs entirely in your browser. The preview, the totals and the PDF are produced on your device, so the business details and prices you type are never sent anywhere. Your draft stays in your own browser storage until you clear it.

The templates are written for real trades and real countries: a plumber bills call-outs and parts, a photographer bills sessions and usage, a UK business needs a VAT number on the invoice. Pro, a one-time upgrade, pays for the site and adds the time-savers that people who invoice every week ask for.

What is on the site

• The invoice generator, which builds invoices, estimates, quotes and receipts as PDFs in your browser.
• Invoice templates by trade: 166 pages.
• Invoice format and requirements by country: 46 pages.
• Invoice, receipt and estimate templates by document type: 25 pages.
• Estimate templates by trade: 58 pages.
• Quote templates by trade: 96 pages.
• Receipt templates by trade: 70 pages.
• Invoice tool alternatives: 4 pages.
• Billwise compared with other invoice tools: 4 pages.

That is 469 reference pages in all. Each one opens the same invoice tool, already filled in for that trade, country or document.

How the pages are made

Template pages are generated from datasets we maintain: typical line items and billing units for each trade, invoice rules for each country, and the fields each document type needs. Totals on every sample are calculated by the same code that runs the invoice generator, so a page and the tool always agree. Country rules cite the tax authority or law they come from and show when they were last checked; wage figures come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. When a rule changes or a mistake is reported, the data is corrected once and every page that uses it is rebuilt. Sample prices are illustrations: use your own.

Every template page is generated from a dataset rather than written one by one, and every figure on it is computed when the site is built: the line-item totals, the tax in the worked examples and the number and date formats. The same code that renders the sample document on a page runs in the tool, so the page and the PDF you download always agree.

Where the data comes from

• Trades: the sample line items, billing units, payment terms and invoicing tips for each trade were written for this site. The prices in them are illustrative examples in US dollars and are labelled that way on every page; replace them with your own rates.
• Wages: where a trade matches a US occupation, the page quotes the national median hourly wage from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS, May 2024), which is in the public domain. It is a reference point for pricing, not a recommended rate.
• Typical tasks: task lists come from O*NET Task Statements, published by the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). O*NET is a trademark of USDOL/ETA; this site is not endorsed by them.
• Countries: tax names, standard and reduced rates and the fields an invoice must show are taken from the tax authorities' own pages (for example HMRC, the ATO, the CRA, IRAS and the EU VAT Directive, Article 226). Each country page lists its sources and the month they were last checked.
• Other invoice tools: comparison pages quote only what each vendor publishes on its own website, with the address and the date we read it.

General information, not tax advice

Country and document pages explain what an invoice usually needs to show, but they are general information. Rules have exceptions that depend on your business, your customer and what you sell, and rates change. Check anything that matters with your tax authority or an accountant before you rely on it.

How the site is funded

The free invoice tool is paid for by an optional one-time Pro upgrade for people who invoice often: saved clients and items, automatic numbering, CSV export and bulk generation. There are no display ads and no sponsored placements, and the documents you make never leave your browser. See the pricing page and the privacy policy for the details.

Spotted an error?

If a rate, a rule or a figure looks wrong, please get in touch with the page address and what you expected to see. Confirmed errors are fixed in the dataset, which corrects every page that uses it at once.