Freelance designers
What belongs on a design invoice
Four things that decide whether a design invoice gets paid or gets a phone call. The generator further down opens with the lines already in it.
Bill by the deliverable and not by the hour where you can. An hour is something a client can dispute; a logo suite delivered is not.
Revisions past the agreed number are a line, at a stated rate, and the line should exist on the invoice even when it is zero. Its presence is what makes the fifth revision a conversation instead of an assumption.
Transfer of rights happens on payment and the invoice should say it. It is the single most useful sentence a freelancer can put on a document, and it costs nothing until the day it is worth everything.
Where a project stalled on the client’s side, invoice the stage that was completed. Waiting to invoice until a project resumes is how freelancers finance their clients for free.
Name the source files and whether they are included. ’Final artwork as PDF and PNG’ and ’editable source files’ are different deliverables at different prices, and a client who assumed the second will ask for it after the invoice is paid.
Say what happens to a project that goes quiet. Thirty days of silence and then a revision request four months later is a scoping problem that could have been a sentence on an invoice. Naming a point at which a stalled project is closed and reopened at current rates is not aggressive; it is the difference between a business and a favour.
The lines below are real work at plausible quantities, and deliberately carry no prices. A price is a local fact about a local market, and a made-up one would be worse than none.