VAT invoice template (South Africa)

Section 20(4) of the VAT Act sets out what a full tax invoice must contain, and SARS applies it strictly — if a required field is missing, the invoice can be disallowed for input VAT. A full tax invoice is required for supplies over R5,000 including VAT; between R50 and R5,000 an abridged version is permitted, but if you're billing businesses it's simpler to always issue the full one.

The template gives you the structure and the arithmetic. You still have to supply the details only you have — your VAT number, your client's VAT number where they're a registered vendor, and an accurate description of what you supplied. Work down this list before you send it.

This is the mistake worth avoiding. Only a registered vendor may charge VAT and only a registered vendor may issue a tax invoice. If you're not registered, adding 15% to your invoice means collecting tax you have no right to collect.

Registration is compulsory once your taxable supplies exceed R2.3 million in any consecutive 12-month period — a threshold that rose from R1 million on 1 April 2026. Voluntary registration is available from R120,000 (up from R50,000 on the same date). If you're under those thresholds and haven't registered voluntarily, use the plain rand invoice generator instead and leave the tax rate at 0.

The rate itself is 15%. The increases to 15.5% and 16% proposed in the 2025 Budget were withdrawn, so despite the headlines nothing changed.

If you price excluding VAT, the VAT is the net times 0.15 — R2,500 net carries R375 VAT for a R2,875 total. The template does this for you as you type.

Working backwards from a VAT-inclusive price is where people slip. You can't take 15% of the inclusive amount — you need the tax fraction, 15/115. On R2,875 inclusive, the VAT is R2,875 x 15/115 = R375. Taking 15% of R2,875 gives R431.25, which is simply wrong and will not reconcile.

Round per line and then sum, rather than computing a total and reverse-engineering the parts. Discrepancies between line items and totals are exactly what draws attention on an audit.

A template works for the occasional invoice. If you're issuing tax invoices regularly, the parts that don't scale are numbering and record-keeping.

SARS requires a serial number, and invoice numbers produced by hand or in a spreadsheet skip and repeat — gaps in a sequence are a question you don't want to answer twice. In a Platybooks workspace, numbers come from the database under a row lock, so they're sequential and gapless per workspace by construction. Your VAT number and address live in settings and land on every PDF automatically, and every amount is stored in cents as a whole number, so nothing drifts by a cent through floating-point rounding.

On top of that: email the invoice with the PDF attached, add a Paystack link so clients pay by card in rand, and let reminders chase what goes overdue. The Free plan covers 1 user, 3 clients and 5 documents a month, free forever.