A commercial invoice is the document that travels with goods across a border. Customs uses it to classify the shipment and work out duty, and under a letter of credit a bank uses it to decide whether to pay. That makes it a different document from the invoice you send a client for work done — if you are looking for a plain sales invoice to bill a customer, this is not the page you want. If you are shipping goods internationally, everything below applies.
Not customs, legal or trade finance advice. Required content differs at every border and changes often, and a held shipment or a rejected document presentation costs real money. Treat the field list below as what authorities and banks generally look for, confirm it against the requirements of the destination country, and use a freight forwarder or customs broker for anything you are not certain of.
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Three documents that are not the same thing
These get used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. Sending the wrong one is one of the commonest reasons a shipment or a payment stalls.
| Document | When it is issued | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Proforma invoice | Before the sale is agreed. | Sets out what you will supply and on what terms. Used by the buyer to arrange payment, apply for an import licence or open a letter of credit. It is not a demand for payment and not an accounting document. |
| Commercial invoice — this page | When the goods ship. | The demand for payment, and the document customs values the consignment from. It is the one that has to be true. |
| Packing list | With the goods. | What is physically in each package, with weights, dimensions and markings. Carries no prices, which is the point — it can be handed to anyone touching the freight. |
A quotation sits one step earlier again: it is an offer, with no commitment to supply until accepted. If you are working out which document you need, start from the quotation and follow the sequence forward — quote, proforma, commercial invoice, payment.
Free commercial invoice templates
Thirty-eight layouts. Take the closest one and add whatever your destination requires — the fields in the next section are the ones worth checking before you send anything.
The file format is not recorded for each of these individually, so only the size is shown. Open the one you want before you commit to it.
There is no prescribed format, but there is required content
This is the distinction the old version of this page missed. No authority dictates where on the page each box goes. What they care about is whether the information is present, legible and consistent. These are the fields worth checking before anything leaves your desk:
| Field | Why it is checked |
|---|---|
| Seller and buyer, in full | Full legal names and addresses, not trading names. Must match the other documents exactly. |
| Consignee, if different from the buyer | Goods are frequently delivered to a third party. Customs needs to know who receives them, the bank needs to know who is paying. |
| Invoice number and date | The reference every other document will quote. Unique, and never reused. |
| Description of goods | Plain language a customs officer can match to what is in the box. Internal part numbers alone are the classic cause of a query. |
| Commodity code per line | The HS-based classification. Determines the duty rate. See below — this is the field most worth getting right. |
| Country of origin | Where the goods were made, which is not necessarily where they were shipped from. Drives preferential duty rates and trade measures. |
| Quantity and unit of measure | In the unit the tariff uses, which may not be the unit you sell in. |
| Unit price, line total, invoice total | And they have to add up. See the arithmetic below. |
| Currency | Stated explicitly. A bare number is ambiguous and a bare symbol often is too. |
| Incoterms rule and named place | Written as the rule plus the place plus the edition, for example “FCA Shanghai Incoterms 2020”. Determines what the price includes. |
| Terms of payment | What is owed, when, and under what mechanism. |
| Weights, packages and marks | Gross and net weight, number of packages, how they are marked. Must agree with the packing list. |
| Reason for export | Sale, sample, repair, replacement, gift. Changes how the consignment is treated. |
| Declaration and signature | Your statement that the invoice is true and correct. It is the exporter’s declaration, not the importer’s. |
That last row is worth dwelling on, because the old version of this page had it backwards. The declaration is a statement you are making, and signing it has consequences if the invoice is wrong. The value you declare must be the real transaction value — that is not a formality, it is the basis on which duty is assessed.
Fourteen fields is more than anyone reliably remembers under time pressure, which is why the sensible place for them is a pre-shipment checklist taped to the inside of the folder rather than in somebody’s head.
Incoterms: eleven rules, and which ones fit your shipment
The Incoterms rules are published by the International Chamber of Commerce and define where the seller’s responsibility ends and the buyer’s begins. The current edition is Incoterms 2020, and there are eleven rules in two groups:
| Any mode of transport | Sea and inland waterway only |
|---|---|
| EXW — Ex Works | FAS — Free Alongside Ship |
| FCA — Free Carrier | FOB — Free on Board |
| CPT — Carriage Paid To | CFR — Cost and Freight |
| CIP — Carriage and Insurance Paid To | CIF — Cost, Insurance and Freight |
| DAP — Delivered at Place | — |
| DPU — Delivered at Place Unloaded | — |
| DDP — Delivered Duty Paid | — |
Three things worth knowing about that table:
- The right-hand four are for water transport. Using FOB for an air freight or a container moved by road is a common error, and it leaves genuine ambiguity about when risk passed. FCA is generally the rule reached for instead.
- DPU appeared in Incoterms 2020 in place of DAT. DAT required delivery at a terminal; DPU lets you name any place. If you are working from an older contract template that still says DAT, it is referring to a rule that is not in the current edition.
- Always write the edition. “FOB Rotterdam” alone does not say which edition’s FOB, and the rules have changed between editions. “FOB Rotterdam Incoterms 2020” does.
One limit worth being clear about: the Incoterms rules allocate cost and risk. They do not tell you which documents the seller has to produce for customs clearance in the buyer’s country. That is a separate question, settled in your contract and by the destination’s own requirements, and assuming the Incoterms rule covers it is how exporters end up short of a document at the border.
The commodity code is the field most worth checking
The classification on each line determines the duty rate, so it is the field with money attached. It is based on the World Customs Organization’s Harmonized System: the first six digits are internationally harmonised, and individual countries extend the code further for their own tariff and statistics.
Here is the part that catches people out. As at February 2026 the HS Convention had 163 Contracting Parties — 162 countries or territories plus the European Union — with a further 49 applications by non-Contracting Parties. The current edition took effect on 1 January 2022. But only 121 of those 163 had implemented the 2022 edition: 81 did so on day one, and 40 more over the following four years.
So roughly a quarter of Contracting Parties were still working to an earlier edition more than four years after the current one came into force. The practical consequence is that a code which is correct at your border is not automatically the code in force at your buyer’s, and a code you used last year may have been superseded. Check the classification against the importing country’s own tariff for the goods you are actually shipping, each time, rather than copying it forward.
Three ways the numbers go wrong
All three are arithmetic rather than judgement, which means all three are avoidable. The figures are illustrations and no currency is implied.
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Rounding the unit price instead of the line total
1,250 units at 3.47 is 4,337.50. Round the unit price to 3.50 for neatness and the total becomes 4,375.00 — out by 37.50, which is 0.86%. Trivially small, and more than enough to make the invoice disagree with the credit or the purchase order. Carry the full unit price and round only the final total, if at all.
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Declaring a value that is not the transaction value
Take a consignment worth 50,000 where the applicable duty rate happens to be 6.2%. Duty is 3,100. Understate the value by 5,000 and it becomes 2,790 — a shortfall of 310 on one shipment. That is not a saving, it is an underpayment of duty, with the penalties and reassessment that follow. The declared value has to be what the goods were actually sold for.
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Leaving the currency or the rate basis implicit
48,500 converted at 1.0825 is 52,501.25. At 1.0790 it is 52,331.50 — a difference of 169.75 from nothing but which day’s rate was used. If conversion is involved, say on the invoice which currency the price is in and what rate basis applies, so there is nothing for anyone to assume. Then reconcile the receipt against the invoice when payment lands, using a payment voucher or whatever your books use, rather than assuming the figures matched.
Consistency across documents is the thing banks reject on
Under a letter of credit the bank is not assessing whether the shipment was good. It is checking whether the documents you presented comply with the credit, and whether they agree with each other. Discrepancies — a name spelled two ways, a description that differs from the credit’s wording, a weight that disagrees with the packing list, a total that does not add up — are the usual reason a presentation is refused, and refusal means delay at best.
So the practical discipline is dull and effective: write the goods description once, in the words the credit uses, and copy it verbatim into every document. Use the full legal entity names everywhere, including the one that appears on your incorporation documents rather than the name you trade under. Check the totals with a calculator rather than trusting the spreadsheet you built last year. None of that is interesting, and it is most of what goes wrong.
Is a commercial invoice the same as a tax invoice?
No, though one document sometimes serves both purposes. A tax invoice is a domestic document whose required content is set by the tax authority for sales tax or VAT purposes. A commercial invoice is an export document for customs and trade finance. The required fields overlap but are not the same, and whether one piece of paper can do both jobs depends on your own tax rules. Check locally rather than assuming.
How many copies do I need?
It depends on the destination, the carrier and whether a letter of credit is involved, and the number is sometimes specified in the credit itself. Ask your freight forwarder for the shipment in front of you rather than working to a standard figure, and read the credit carefully if there is one, because presenting the wrong number of originals is itself a discrepancy.
Do I need to show freight and insurance separately?
Often, yes, and it follows from the Incoterms rule. Where the price includes carriage or insurance, customs may need those amounts identified separately to work out the value for duty, because the basis of valuation does not always include them. Showing the goods value, the freight and the insurance as separate lines with a clear total is more work and causes fewer queries.
What about samples or goods sent free of charge?
They still need a commercial invoice and they still need a value — goods with no commercial value do not exist as far as customs is concerned. The convention is to state a value for customs purposes only and to say plainly on the invoice that no payment is required, with the reason for export given as a sample, a replacement or whatever applies. Do not write a nil value.
Can I use one of these templates as it is?
As a starting layout, yes. Before you use it for a real shipment, check it against the field table above and against what your destination requires — the older a template is, the more likely it predates a change. In particular check that it has somewhere for a commodity code per line, a country of origin, an Incoterms rule with a named place, and a declaration. Any template missing those four needs editing before it is fit for export.
Who signs it?
Someone at the exporter authorised to make the declaration, with their name and position printed as well as signed — an illegible signature with no name beside it is not useful to anyone checking it. Whether a wet signature is required, and whether an electronic one is accepted, varies by destination and by carrier, so confirm before you rely on a scan.
What if I get something wrong after the goods have shipped?
Tell your forwarder or broker immediately rather than waiting to see whether it is noticed. An error corrected before the goods are presented to customs is usually an administrative fix; the same error found afterwards can mean a reassessment, a penalty and a delay. Keep the superseded version rather than quietly replacing it, so the correction has a trail.
If the sale started from a written proposal, keep the goods description consistent all the way from there to the invoice — a description that drifts between the proposal, the quote and the shipping documents is the same consistency problem arriving earlier in the chain.
