The Free Invoice Template for Excel & Google Sheets, No Signup Required

What's in the free file

The free invoice template is three sheets, built to get one invoice out the door in a few minutes:

• Start Here. A short setup guide and a Settings block where you set your currency symbol, your business name, and your default payment terms in days — all three feed straight into the Invoice tab.
• Invoice. A printable single-page invoice: a From block (your business) and a Bill To block (your client), an Invoice # and Invoice Date you fill in, a Due Date that calculates itself from your payment terms, twelve line-item rows for Description, Qty, and Unit Price, and a Subtotal, Tax %, Tax amount, and Total that all update themselves as you type. The print area is already set to fit one portrait page.
• Invoice Log. Thirty rows to record every invoice you send by hand — Invoice #, Client, Date, Due date, Amount, and a Status dropdown (Draft, Sent, Paid, Overdue) — plus three totals at the bottom: total invoiced, total paid, and total outstanding, worked out from the Status column automatically.

That's genuinely everything — there's no hidden fourth tab, no locked cells waiting for a paid unlock. What you see in the download is the whole product, filled in with one sample invoice and three sample log rows so you can see how it's meant to look before you clear them out.

How to use it in Excel

1. Download the file and open it in Excel like any other workbook.
2. Open the Start Here tab and set your currency symbol, business name, and payment terms in the Settings block.
3. Go to the Invoice tab. Your business name already fills in from Start Here — replace the sample address, email, and phone with your own, then replace the Bill To block with your client's details.
4. Enter your Invoice #, Invoice Date, and up to twelve line items. The Due Date, Subtotal, Tax amount, and Total all calculate themselves as you go.
5. When it's ready, log it on the Invoice Log tab so you have a record of what you've sent and its status.

How to use it in Google Sheets

The file isn't a native Google Sheet, but importing it takes under a minute and nothing about the formulas or the dropdown breaks in the process:

1. Open Google Sheets and go to File > Import.
2. Choose the Upload tab and select the .xlsx file you downloaded.
3. When prompted for an import location, choose Insert new sheet(s) (or "Create new spreadsheet" if you'd rather it live on its own) and confirm.
4. All three tabs come in together, along with the Status dropdown and every formula on the Invoice and Invoice Log tabs — nothing needs to be rebuilt.
5. From there it behaves like any other Google Sheet: fill in the Invoice tab, and the totals keep themselves current.

How to save your invoice as a PDF

Most clients expect a PDF, not an editable spreadsheet, so the Invoice tab's print area is already set to fit one portrait page — no fiddling with page breaks or scaling. In Excel, go to File > Print, choose a PDF printer such as "Microsoft Print to PDF" (Windows) or use File > Export > Create PDF/XPS (or macOS's built-in PDF button in the print dialog), and save. In Google Sheets, right-click the Invoice tab, choose Print sheet, confirm the current sheet only is selected, and use Save as PDF from the destination dropdown. Either way, only the Invoice tab prints — the Start Here and Invoice Log tabs stay out of what your client sees.

What the free version leaves out

This is meant to be honest, not a teaser with the good parts hidden: the free template is a genuinely smaller product, not a crippled version of a bigger one. Specifically, it leaves out:

• Auto-numbered invoices. You type the invoice number in yourself here. The paid Freelancer Client & Invoice Tracker generates the next number automatically based on how many invoices you've already logged.
• A live Dashboard. There's no automatic snapshot of your outstanding balance, overdue total and count, or average days to payment — just the three totals on the Invoice Log tab.
• A Clients tab. Something that totals what each client has been invoiced and paid, automatically, as you log invoices, rather than tracking clients only inside each invoice.
• A Pipeline tab. For tracking leads and proposals before they become invoices, with a weighted deal-value estimate.
• The rest of the toolkit. A 12-month income & expense tracker with a category dashboard, a tax set-aside calculator, and a rate calculator — separate workbooks that ship alongside the invoice tracker in the full bundle.

If any of those would actually get used, the Freelancer Finance Toolkit on Etsy bundles all of it together, including the fuller Client & Invoice Tracker this template is a stripped-down preview of. If it's bookkeeping rather than invoicing you're after, there's also the free income & expense tracker.

Need something built around your exact business instead?

This template is built around the generic shape of a freelance invoice — one client, one project, a flat tax rate. If your invoicing needs something these sheets don't handle (multiple tax rates, recurring billing, a workflow specific to what you do), the custom spreadsheet service builds a workbook around your actual invoices instead of asking you to adapt to a template.