An invoice is the least interesting document in a cleaning business and the one that decides when you get paid. Most of what goes wrong with it is not layout: it is that the invoice and the work it bills live in different places, so someone retypes it, and a retyped invoice is late, wrong, or never raised at all. What belongs on the document is short and settled; what belongs behind it is the visit that produced it.
What has to be on the document
Your business name and address as the customer knows them, their name and the address cleaned, an invoice number that increments, the date issued and the date due, what was done and when, the amount, the tax if you charge it, and how to pay including the details. That is the whole list. Anything else is preference, and anything missing is a reason for a slow payer to wait.
Residential and janitorial invoices are different documents
A residential invoice bills a visit, or a set of visits in a period, and moves when the visits move. A janitorial invoice bills a contract at a monthly price and does not move when a visit does, because the customer bought a specification rather than a headcount of attendances. Software that produces only the first shape will have you writing the second by hand every month.
Why it has to come from the visit
The invoice should be produced from the work rather than typed alongside it, which is the difference between billing everything and billing most things. Small cleaning businesses lose real money to visits that happened and were never invoiced, and nobody notices because there is no document to be missing. Raising it from the schedule closes that gap permanently.
Questions people ask about cleaning invoice
Do I have to charge sales tax on cleaning?
It depends on your state and sometimes on the type of cleaning. Ask your accountant once and then set it in your invoicing; it is not a question to answer per invoice.
How soon should I invoice?
The day the work is done for residential, the first of the month for contracts. Delay is the single largest cause of slow payment in this trade.
Should the invoice carry my branding?
Yes, and it is worth checking whether a product puts its own name on your documents on the free plan.