How to write a welder and fabricator invoice

What goes on a welder and fabricator invoice

Six things, in the order they belong on the page. The invoice generator opens a welder / fabricator document with the lines already in place, so most of this is checking rather than typing.

1. Separate shop hours from site hours. Site work carries travel, mobile plant and lost shop time, and it should carry a different rate.
2. Price steel by weight or length with the specification. Grade, section and quantity. It is what the customer is buying and what a repeat order depends on.
3. Put consumables and gas on the invoice. Wire, rods, discs and gas are real cost per hour of arc time.
4. Bill finishing separately. Grinding, dressing, galvanising and paint are separate operations, often subcontracted.
5. State the certification or procedure where one applies. Coded work is bought on the coding, and it belongs on the document.
6. Charge delivery and lifting. Fabricated steel is heavy, and getting it to site and into place is a job.

The lines a welder and fabricator invoice usually carries

These are the lines the generator opens with when you pick Welder / fabricator. The figures are a starting point to type over rather than a going rate: this site runs no pricing survey, and the number on your invoice should be the one you charge.

Add, rename, reorder or delete any line, and set tax per line where it applies. Priced as they open, that comes to $1,540 before tax.

A worked welder and fabricator invoice, filled in

This is the same job as the table above, written out the way it would leave your phone. Every figure on it is a starting point rather than a going rate, and the tax line is shown at ten per cent purely so the arithmetic is visible: set your own rate, or none, per line.

Subtotal $1,540, tax $154, total $1,694. The parts worth copying are the structure rather than the numbers: the job reference next to the client, every line separately priced with its count showing, the tax on its own line, and terms that name a number of days instead of saying on receipt.

Shop rate against site rate, and why they cannot be the same number

An hour in your shop uses your bench, your power and your equipment with nothing lost. An hour on site costs you the travel, a van full of gear, a generator, and the work you could have been doing at the bench.

Publish two rates and use them plainly. Site work at a higher hourly rate, with travel and mobile plant as their own lines, is normal in fabrication and easily understood by trade customers.

The related discipline is minimum charges on site. A short repair two hours away is a full half-day of your capacity, and pricing it as one hour of welding is how mobile work quietly loses money.

Materials, consumables and the cost of the arc

Steel is straightforward: specify the grade and section, show the weight or the length, and price it as supplied goods. What gets forgotten is everything the welding itself consumes.

Wire or rods, shielding gas, cutting and grinding discs, and the offcut waste from standard lengths all cost money per hour of work. Either build them into a consumables line or into your rate deliberately, but do not let them be the thing you never charged for.

Cutting waste deserves its own mention on custom work. A part that needs a six foot section from a six meter length has consumed material the customer cannot see in the finished piece, and stating it as an allowance is better than absorbing it.

Certification, drawings and the invoice a commercial customer can process

Fabrication for a builder, an engineer or a factory is a business-to-business transaction, and those invoices are paid by a person who never saw the work.

Reference the drawing number, the job or purchase order number, and the item or mark numbers you fabricated. Where the work was coded or made to a stated procedure, put that on the invoice as well, because it is often what the customer needs to file.

Keep the descriptions the same as the ones on the drawing rather than describing them in your own words. An invoice that matches the drawing gets approved; one that has to be interpreted gets queried.

Hourly, fixed price or per unit: how welders and fabricators price the work

Fabrication is priced on the bench and delivered on site, and those two places cost different money. A shop hour uses your equipment with nothing lost. A site hour costs the travel, the van, the generator and the work you were not doing at the bench.

Charge the arc as well as the hour. Gas, wire, rods and discs have a real cost per hour of welding, and either they are a consumables line on the invoice or they are a deduction from your margin that nobody ever sees.

Working out what to charge

This guide is about what goes on the document, not what the number should be, and nobody should hand you a rate for your own market. What the site can do is the arithmetic: the freelance rate calculator works back from what you need to earn, the service price calculator prices a service against your costs, and the profit margin calculator checks what is left once the job is done.

Writing it on your phone, in five steps

Most welders and fabricators write the invoice standing next to the work rather than at a desk a week later, and the week later version is the one that gets details wrong. The generator is built for the first case.

1. Open it with your trade already chosen. The welder / fabricator invoice loads with fabrication labor (per hour) and the rest of the lines already on the page.
2. Put the client and the job reference in first. It is the part you will not remember accurately in three days, and on agent, landlord or contractor work it is the reason the invoice gets paid at all.
3. Edit the lines rather than starting from empty. Change the quantities and the rates, delete what you did not do, add what you did. Keeping the descriptions means the wording stays consistent from one job to the next.
4. Set the terms to 30 days and add a payment link. A due date that is an actual date gets chased. A link and a QR code means it can be settled before you have packed up.
5. Send it before you leave. The clock on your terms starts when the invoice arrives, not when the work finished, so every day it sits unsent is a day added to getting paid.

Getting paid once it is sent

Put a due date and your terms on the document, because an invoice without them is hard to chase. Add a payment link and a QR so settling up is a tap rather than a transfer somebody has to set up. When part of it lands, the receipt maker records it as a part payment and prints the balance still due. If the due date passes, the late fee calculator works out what your own terms allow and writes the chasing letter to go with it.

Five dates decide whether a welder and fabricator gets paid on time, and four of them are set before the work starts.

Mistakes that cost welders and fabricators money

• One rate for shop and site. Mobile work quietly subsidised by the bench.
• Consumables never charged. Gas, wire and discs paid from your margin every hour.
• Steel specification missing. No record for a repeat order and no defense on a spec dispute.
• Finishing folded into fabrication. Galvanising and paint disappear into a labor figure.
• No drawing or order reference. A commercial invoice nobody in the office can match.

Welder / fabricator invoice questions

Free welder and fabricator invoice template

The free welder and fabricator invoice template opens with the lines above already priced, in any of 200 designs, and exports a print-ready PDF with no signup and nothing saved to a server. If you would rather edit a file offline, there are 72 Word templates, 72 Excel templates with the totals already calculating, and 72 fillable PDFs.

Invoicing guides for related trades

The same billing questions come up next door. These four guides cover the trades closest to welders and fabricators, and each one sits alongside its own free template.

Every trade has one: see all 46 invoicing guides, or go straight to the 46 free invoice templates they describe.

Everything on this site, set up for welders and fabricators

The whole toolkit, with the reason each one matters to welders and fabricators rather than in general. The five marked links open with welder / fabricator already selected.

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