An invoice to an Indian brand needs nine things: your name and address, the brand's registered name and address, a unique invoice number, the date, a description of what you delivered, the amount, your PAN, your bank details, and a due date. If you are registered for GST, four more fields stop being optional.
That is the whole answer. The reason this post exists is everything around it, because an invoice is not paperwork you send after the work is done. It is the document that starts the payment clock, and most creators send something that never starts it.
There is also one thing nearly every creator invoice guide in India gets wrong, and it is in the section below on GST.
What has to be on a creator invoice?
Nine fields, whether you are invoicing your first brand or your fiftieth.
- Your full name and address, exactly as they appear on your PAN.
- The brand's registered legal name and address, not the marketing name. The entity that pays you is often not the brand on the packet.
- An invoice number that is unique and sequential.
- The date you raised it.
- A description of what you delivered. One reel, two stories, and the delivery dates. Not "influencer services".
- The amount, in figures, with the currency named.
- Your PAN.
- Your bank details: account name, account number, IFSC.
- A payment due date, stated as a date and not as "net 30".
The two fields people most often skip are the third and the ninth, and they are the two that matter most. A brand's accounts team pays against a reference, and an invoice with no number is a document with no reference. A due date written as a real date is a date someone can be late for. "Net 30" is a phrase.
If you are unsure what belongs in the amount field, our guide to what brands actually pay for a reel in India works through the arithmetic.
Do you charge GST on the invoice?
Only if you are registered. Registration becomes compulsory once your aggregate turnover crosses ₹20 lakh in a financial year, or ₹10 lakh if you are in one of the special category states. Below that line you can invoice brands perfectly legally and charge no tax at all. Our explainer on the GST threshold for influencers covers where exactly that line sits and what counts towards it.
Here is the part almost every creator invoice template online gets wrong. They tell unregistered creators to issue a "bill of supply". That is the wrong document. A bill of supply is issued by a registered person who cannot charge GST on a particular supply, because the supply is exempt or because they are under the composition scheme. If you are not registered at all, GST law simply does not reach you, and what you issue is an ordinary invoice with no tax line and no GSTIN on it.
It sounds like a technicality. It is not, because writing "Bill of Supply" and a GSTIN-shaped blank on a document is the fastest way to make a brand's finance team stall your payment while they work out what you are.
Once you do register, four fields become compulsory on top of the nine: your GSTIN, the brand's GSTIN, the SAC code (influencer and advertising work sits at 998361, taxed at 18 percent), and the tax split.
The split depends on where the brand is. Where you supply services to a GST-registered business, the place of supply is that business's location. A Jaipur creator invoicing a Jaipur brand charges CGST and SGST. The same creator invoicing a Bengaluru brand charges IGST instead, at the same total of 18 percent. Getting this wrong is the single most common reason a brand's accountant sends an invoice back.
What the GST rules actually require
Two rules are worth knowing by heart once you are registered, because both are easy to breach by accident.
The invoice number has a shape. Under Rule 46 of the CGST Rules it must be consecutive, unique within the financial year, and no more than 16 characters, using only letters, numbers, hyphens and slashes. No hash symbols, no spaces, no starting again at 001 halfway through the year because you changed your invoice software.
And there is a deadline. An invoice for services has to be issued within 30 days of supplying them. Creators routinely miss this one by waiting until the brand confirms the reel performed well, which can be six weeks after it went live.
Why does the brand pay less than you invoiced?
Tax deducted at source, nearly every time, and it is the single most common panicked message creators send.
A brand paying you a fee for content work is paying for a professional service, and deducts 10 percent under Section 194J. That deduction kicks in once its payments to you cross ₹50,000 in a financial year, a threshold raised from ₹30,000 with effect from 1 April 2025. Some brands treat creator work as contract work instead, which carries a lower rate with its own thresholds. From 1 April 2026 the old 194 series was consolidated, and what everyone still calls 194J now sits in Section 393(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, at the professional services entry. The rate and the threshold did not change.
Two things follow, and both are good news.
The first is that the ₹50,000 is annual and counted per brand, not per invoice. Across 322 connected creators on our own marketplace with a reel rate on file, spread over 130 cities and 27 states, the median asking price for a reel is ₹1,610 in the 1,000 to 10,000 follower band and ₹5,532 in the 10,000 to 50,000 band. These are asking prices on Qolab in September 2026 rather than a survey of the Indian market, but they make the point: a single deal for most creators is nowhere near the threshold, and a creator working with eight different brands can cross ₹4 lakh in a year without a rupee of TDS anywhere.
The second is that the deduction is not a cost. It is your own money, paid in advance against your final bill, and it comes back as a refund if your actual liability is lower. The mistake is never claiming it.
Whatever is deducted should appear against your PAN in your annual tax statement on the income tax portal. Check it before you file, because tax a brand deducted but never reported is not creditable to you. Products you were sent rather than paid follow a different rule entirely, which our post on Section 194R and barter deals covers.
A line you can copy
The invoice itself can be a single page in any word processor. What is worth copying is the payment block at the bottom, because that is the part brands read.
“Payment due by <date>, by bank transfer to the account above. Please quote invoice number <number> with the payment. PAN <number>. Udyam registration <number>: under the MSMED Act, 2006 payment falls due within 45 days of acceptance of the work. Queries on this invoice to <email> within 7 days of receipt.”
That last sentence matters more than it looks. Without it, a brand can raise a query in week six and reset the whole clock. With it, silence is acceptance.
What actually gets an invoice paid on time?
This is where the free thing nobody tells creators about comes in.
Udyam is the government's MSME registration. It costs nothing, needs no documents uploaded, and the certificate has lifetime validity with no renewal. A solo creator operating as a sole proprietor is eligible, and you do not need a GST number to get one if GST is not compulsory for you in the first place.
What it buys you is a legal clock. Under the MSMED Act, 2006, a buyer must pay a registered micro or small supplier by the agreed date and within 45 days at the outside, or within 15 days where there is no written agreement. Late payment carries interest at three times the RBI bank rate, compounded monthly. Income tax law reinforces it from the buyer's side by pushing their deduction for that expense into the year they actually pay, which turns a slow payment into a tax problem for them rather than a cash flow problem only for you.
That matters because of how long the wait actually is. A July 2025 Storyboard18 report found that larger brands and agencies routinely hold creator payments for 90 to 120 days, well past that 45-day cycle, and quoted an industry executive describing influencers who had gone unpaid for close to a year. The rule exists precisely because this is normal. Almost no creator invokes it, and the reasons brands get away with it have very little to do with the law.
You will rarely need to enforce any of this. Putting the registration number on the invoice is usually enough, because it tells a finance team that a late payment has a price attached.
What to do this week
If you have ever been paid late, the fix is not a better template. It is three habits.
- Raise the invoice the day you deliver, not the day you remember.
- Keep one numbering series for the whole financial year, in one place.
- Check your annual tax statement before filing, against your own list of deals.
On Qolab the paper trail is built in: the terms and the amount are recorded when the deal is agreed, and payouts are released after delivery is verified, so what you file matches what happened. If you are still working over direct messages, the invoice is the only record you will have, which is a good reason to make it a real one.
None of this is about being formal. It is about being payable.
If you want that paper trail without maintaining it yourself, a creator account on Qolab records the terms and amount on each deal and releases the payout after delivery is verified, free to open.
