Consulting invoices, retainers included
Bill day rates, workshops and monthly retainers on one document, with a service period and PO reference your client’s finance team will actually accept.
Opens the standard builder with the Generic format and sensible line items already selected. Change anything you like.
Preset template: Manuscript
Retainers and day rates together
A monthly retainer line, a workshop at a day rate and a handful of expenses coexist on one invoice without fighting the layout.
Service period, not just an issue date
Large clients reject invoices that do not say which period the work covers. Set a period start and end and it prints in the header.
PO numbers front and centre
Enterprise AP systems match on the purchase order. The PO field prints in the reference block where their scanner expects it.
Why consulting invoices get held up
Consulting invoices bounce for procedural reasons far more often than commercial ones. The three usual causes are a missing purchase order number, no service period, and a description too vague to match against the statement of work.
A line reading "Consulting — October" will sit in someone’s queue. "Discovery workshop facilitation, 2 days, per SOW #4, 6–7 Oct" will not, because the person approving it can tie it to something they already agreed to.
Retainers deserve their own line
If you bill a monthly retainer, invoice it as a single line with the month in the description and the period fields filled in, rather than reverse-engineering it into hours. It makes the recurring nature obvious and it makes your own revenue reporting cleaner.
Where a retainer includes an hours allowance, put any overage on a second line at your overage rate. Two lines that add up beats one line that needs explaining.
Expenses and pass-throughs
Recharged expenses belong on the invoice as their own lines, at cost, with the tax treatment they actually carry. Where a pass-through is not your supply, mark the line as non-taxable so it is excluded from the tax base — the US format has a per-line taxable toggle for exactly this.
Attach receipts separately rather than embedding them; keep the invoice a single clean document.
Questions