An invoice can be accurate in total and still be unpayable inside the customer’s process. A missing purchase-order number may route it to an exception queue. A wrong legal entity may force a credit and reissue. A payment link can exist but point to the wrong currency.
Use this checklist on the final draft, not as a substitute for the broader invoicing workflow.
Mistake 1: billing the wrong entity
Confirm the customer’s legal name, billing address, tax identifier, and accounts-payable email. The person who commissioned the work may not be the entity that owes the money. A group of companies can have several similar trading names, so verify the contracting entity against the signed quote, order, or vendor record.
Also check your own sender details. A stale address, missing registration number, or old bank account can make an otherwise correct invoice fail review.
Pre-send question: Would a reviewer who has never met you know exactly who supplied the work and who must pay?
Mistake 2: omitting the customer’s routing reference
Purchase-order numbers, cost centers, project codes, department names, and buyer contacts are not decoration. They route the invoice to the right approver. Compare the draft with the acceptance email or quote, and preserve capitalization or formatting when the customer’s system expects an exact match.
Invoice Master has a purchase-order field on invoices, links to contacts, companies, and projects, and supports custom fields for other references. A project link is useful internally; a custom field or line-item description may still be needed on the PDF if the client must see the code.
Pre-send question: What data does this customer use to approve and allocate the cost?
Mistake 3: trusting the total without checking the inputs
Review every line item: description, quantity, unit, unit price, tax, and amount. The invoice template field anatomy explains what each section needs to communicate. Confirm the currency once at the document level and again in your payment instructions. Check whether tax is inclusive or exclusive and whether discounts or deposits are represented in a way the application actually supports.
Do not add an exchange rate merely because the client is abroad. If the contract is in USD and the invoice is in USD, the invoice can remain a USD obligation. If local rules require a home-currency tax amount or an exchange-rate reference, obtain the correct method from a qualified adviser or tax authority.
Pre-send question: Can you reproduce the total from the contract and supporting records without guessing?
Mistake 4: leaving time open to interpretation
Check the issue date, service period, due date, and validity date where relevant. Replace vague wording such as “pay promptly” with a specific date. If the contract says Net 30, verify what starts the clock: invoice issue, receipt, acceptance, or another event.
For recurring work, inspect the generated draft before sending. Invoice Master recurring schedules create a new draft from the saved parties, line items, cadence, and payment terms; they do not automatically email it or attach a Stripe payment link. A schedule reduces retyping, but it does not validate that this month’s scope stayed the same.
Pre-send question: Are the dates consistent with both the agreement and the delivery event?
Mistake 5: testing the document but not the route to payment
Open the exact customer-facing version. Check the PDF, public link, or portal view on a narrow screen. Verify that the total and due date are visible, the payment instructions are complete, and any online checkout opens for the intended invoice.
If you email from Invoice Master, remember that document email is a Premium feature and subject to a delivery rate limit. Public read-only links are a separate sharing method. Portal conversations and quote acceptance require an invited portal relationship; a public link alone is not an e-signature or collaboration thread.
Pre-send question: Could the customer receive, approve, and pay this invoice using only what you sent?
The 60-second final pass
Read the invoice in this order:
- sender and customer identity;
- invoice number, purchase order, and project reference;
- currency, line items, tax, and total;
- issue date, due date, and service period;
- payment instructions and customer-facing link; and
- notes, footer, spelling, and attachment list.
Then preview once more as the customer. The point is not perfectionism. It is to catch the small defects that turn a routine payable into an avoidable email chain.