Tradie invoice: the $1,000 line most jobs cross

The week is billable and the invoices are not out. For an Australian trade business the run takes twenty minutes if four things were settled earlier in the week, and most of an evening if they were not.

Settle GST at the quote, not at the invoice

A quote for $2,000 plus GST and a quote for $2,000 including GST are $200 apart, and the customer comparing them cannot tell. Pick one convention for the whole business, say which one on the document, and carry it through to the invoice — the same trap, and what it does to a job that runs over, is in the GST line that makes two quotes uncomparable.

The $75 line and the $1,000 line

Two thresholds, and only one of them is well known.

Below $75 of value — that is GST-exclusive, so $82.50 with GST on top — you need not issue a tax invoice at all. Above it, a customer who asks is entitled to one.

At or above $1,000 total price, the invoice must carry the recipient's identity or their ABN, not just the site address. This is the one that catches jobs which grew: the quote was $800, two variations took it to $1,400, and the invoice still reads "Job — Smith St". Section 29-70(1) adds one more that copied templates lose: the document has to be readable as a tax invoice. A progress claim with every figure correct can fail on that alone.

A payment claim is not a tax invoice

On commercial work the document that starts the security of payment clock is a payment claim, and the respondent answers it with a payment schedule inside a deadline set by the act of that state — a different count in each, and shorter again where the contract says so. The clock only starts when the claim goes out, which makes an unsent claim the most expensive draft in the business: eight jurisdictions, eight sets of deadlines.

Write the job, not the trade

"Electrical work" is a category, not a description. Quantity and price per supply is what the Act asks for, and it is also what keeps a variation visible: switchboard upgrade, 12 downlights supplied and installed, 38 metres of cable, two hours of day work at the agreed rate. A line-item invoice survives a query; a one-line invoice becomes a conversation.

Before you pay your own subbies

The withholding duty sits with the payer. If a subcontractor's invoice for more than $75 excluding GST quotes no ABN, you withhold the top rate of tax and pay it to the ATO — and you are the one out of pocket if you do not. Check the ABN before the payment run, not after it: why the duty is the payer's. The same payments come back every August in your TPAR — the 50 per cent test and 28 August.

28 days, and it starts when they ask

The 28-day period for giving a tax invoice runs from the customer's request, not from the job. The same 28 days applies to an adjustment note — and where you discover an overcharge yourself, it runs from the moment you became aware of it, with nobody asking.

Both clocks start on an event rather than on a date you choose, which is the argument for a system that holds them rather than a memory that does. For the shape of a running job on a builder's phone, see Zirko for builders.

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What Zirko does here: quantity, unit, description and price sit on every line item, GST is calculated per line and frozen onto the issued document, and the document number is issued by the server in an unbroken series. A finished invoice cannot be edited — the correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number.