What is in the pack
- Contractor / trades invoice: progress billing against a signed estimate, labor and materials split, deposit tracking, and a materials-title clause.
- Freelance designer / creative invoice: deposit-and-balance structure, revision-round billing, usage rights transferring on full payment, and kill-fee language.
- Small retailer / e-commerce invoice: order-linked billing with a shortage and damage claims window, and a prepaid-only consequence for aged accounts.
- Wholesaler / distributor invoice: PO and lot references, freight and FOB terms, 2/10 net 30 early-payment discount, a 48-hour claims window, and paused-allocation language for accounts past 60 days.
- The terms guide: the short list of payment-terms decisions that measurably change how fast you get paid, explained below.
What makes payment terms effective (the part most templates skip)
The template is the easy half. What determines whether invoices get paid on time is a handful of terms decisions, and they are worth getting right once:
- Print the date, not just the code. "Net 30" makes the customer do arithmetic; "Due August 27" makes the calendar do it. Print both.
- Pay for speed instead of punishing delay, where you can afford it. An early-payment discount (2/10 net 30) moves you up a bookkeeper's pile in a way a late fee never does; price the 2% against your real cost of waiting 20 extra days.
- State the late fee, apply it rarely, waive it audibly. The clause changes behavior by existing; the occasional deliberate waiver buys goodwill. Check your local cap before setting the rate.
- Prefer consequences you control. Interest must be chased; prepaid-only status, paused allocations, and held final files are enforced by you, unilaterally, the day the account crosses the line. Every template in the pack includes one.
- Remove clicks. The payment link belongs on the invoice and on every reminder. Days-sales-outstanding is partly a UX metric.
When terms fail anyway, and they sometimes will, the escalation ladder with copy-paste reminder emails is in the overdue invoice guide, with its own downloadable pack. And if the actual bottleneck is that invoices go out late or wrong in the first place, that is a process problem before it is a terms problem: the invoicing automation guide covers the fix, honestly including where software is not it.
Common questions
Yes: no email, no account, no watermark, and no attribution required on your invoices. Download, adapt, invoice. If you share the pack, linking this page is appreciated but not required.
It is standard commercial language with placeholders, not legal advice. Late-fee and interest caps vary by state and province, so have your numbers checked locally before relying on them. The safest consequences are the ones you control unilaterally: prepaid-only status, paused allocations, held deliverables.
Shorter than you think. Net 30 is convention, not law; trades and freelancers can default to net 14, and wholesale relationships often support 2/10 net 30, which pays customers to be fast. Whatever you pick, print the actual due date next to the term.
The pack is plain markdown on purpose: it pastes cleanly into Word, Google Docs, Notion, or your invoicing tool without formatting fights. If a formatted version would genuinely help you, tell us via the contact page and we will add one.
Templates write the invoice once; the queue writes it every time
flo.space drafts each invoice from the thread where the deal was agreed, on your terms, for your approval. The templates are yours either way.