Free Invoice Template

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 05, 2011

Vertex42 specializes in Excel templates. Its Free Invoice Template is designed to give small businesses an easy and inexpensive way to bill their customers. It's customizable, too, and it even calculates subtotals and taxes. You need Microsoft's Excel to run it, or a similar program that can run Excel spreadsheets.

As with other Vertex42 templates we've tried, Free Invoice Template is a very small download, just under 11KB zipped and 43KB unzipped. We clicked the extracted template, which opened inside Excel 2010 in a protected view. We clicked Enable Editing, which allowed us to make and save changes to create our own documents. The template includes three different invoice styles, each with sample figures that do as good a job as a page of text in showing how the invoices work. We started by entering our company's name, address, and other information, including tax rates, and then we cleared the cells we'd be entering data into by simply highlighting them and deleting the content. When we'd finished our custom template, we named it and saved it the appropriate directory. To use our custom template, we opened it in Excel, entered the customer's data and our invoice data, named and saved it, and then either printed it for delivery or e-mailed it to the customer. Entering our data was easy; for instance, we merely had to enter an X to indicate a taxable item, and the spreadsheet would calculate the tax. We could also add comments, company slogans, customer IDs, and do pretty much anything else we could do with an Excel template. Web links accessed information on how to use Free Invoice Template, including a link to a corresponding Price Quote Template.

Excel templates let users create customized professional-quality documents quickly and easily. For small businesses, contractors, freelancers, and others, tools like Free Invoice Template can make a difference.