Invoice in Spanish, with every term explained

How to say invoice in Spanish

The Spanish word for invoice is factura. It's a feminine noun, so you write la factura and, in the plural, las facturas, and it means the same thing everywhere Spanish is spoken, from Mexico and Puerto Rico to Colombia and Spain. The verb that goes with it is facturar, to bill or to invoice, so a client who asks "¿Me puede facturar?" is asking you to send an invoice. If you're here because a document headed Factura arrived and you wanted it in English, it's exactly what it sounds like: a request for payment that lists what was supplied, what it costs and when it has to be paid.

A few neighboring words are easy to confuse with it, and the difference matters because each one does a different job. A recibo is a receipt, which confirms that money has already been paid, whereas a factura asks for money that is still owed; the difference between an invoice and a receipt is the same in both languages. A presupuesto or cotización is a quote or estimate, the price you offer before the work starts. And la cuenta is the check you ask for in a restaurant, which is why the everyday English "bill" isn't always a factura.

For a US business, the reason to learn these words is practical. You might paint houses in San Antonio, clean offices in Miami or build websites for a family business in Los Angeles, and your client reads Spanish more comfortably than English. An invoice they understand at a glance raises fewer questions and is less likely to sit unpaid while someone works out what it says.

The Spanish words on an invoice and what they mean

The table lists the terms you'll find on almost every Spanish invoice, roughly in the order they appear on the page. Where Spain and Latin America tend to use different words, both are given, because a client in Madrid and a client in Monterrey will each recognize their own version faster. For clients in the US, the Latin American wording is usually the better default.

Some of these deserve a word of explanation. Fecha de vencimiento comes from vencer, to fall due or expire, so it's the last day your client has to pay, and you'll also see the short form vence el 7 de diciembre, "due December 7." Concepto is the word many businesses in Spain and Mexico use for the description column, so your clients will know it from invoices they get elsewhere, but descripción is just as clear. Importe and monto both mean an amount of money, and either will be understood.

The tax line needs the most care. Many clients from Spain or Latin America are used to seeing IVA on an invoice, the abbreviation for value-added tax (impuesto al valor agregado, or impuesto sobre el valor añadido in Spain). A US invoice charges sales tax, not VAT, so IVA would name the wrong tax; impuesto or impuesto sobre las ventas says what it actually is. The closing line gracias por su preferencia means roughly "thank you for choosing us," and you'll see it on many invoices and receipts in Mexico; gracias por su confianza, "thank you for your trust," is a common alternative.

Making the invoice in Spanish, step by step

The maker prints invoices in 20 languages, and Spanish is one of them: when you choose it, the invoice and the PDF switch to Spanish as a whole. The button on this page opens the maker with Spanish already chosen, so you start from a Spanish invoice instead of converting an English one. From an empty page to a PDF you can send, it goes like this:

1. Open the maker with the button on this page. It's set up for a US business, with amounts in USD, US Letter paper and the invoice language set to Spanish, so the preview is in Spanish from the start.
2. Fill in your business details and your client's name and address, and add how you want to be paid: bank transfer with your routing and account number, check, Zelle, Venmo or Cash App.
3. Add a line for each job or product, writing the description in Spanish, then the quantity, unit and price. If a line is taxable in your state, give it the sales tax rate; tax is added only to those lines, and the subtotal, tax and total are worked out for you.
4. Set the invoice date and due date, and write your notes and payment terms in Spanish. This is the place for gracias por su preferencia and for a sentence saying which currency the amounts are in.
5. Check the preview, then download the PDF or print it. With a free account you can also email the invoice with the PDF attached, or send a link to a page where your client can view and download it.

The invoice number counts up automatically, and all your invoices share one series whatever their language, which is what you want: the number identifies the sale in your records, whichever language the client reads it in. If this is your first invoice of any kind, the guide on how to make an invoice walks through the parts that have nothing to do with Spanish, from what to include to sending it.

What the maker translates and what you write yourself

The language switch changes everything the maker prints by itself: the word Factura at the top, the labels for the number and dates, the column headings, the subtotal, tax and total lines, and the headings around your payment details. It doesn't touch the text you type. Your item descriptions, notes, payment terms and custom fields stay exactly as you wrote them, and so do your business name, your client's name and both addresses. That's the right way round, because an automatic translation of your work could easily say something you didn't mean, but it does mean that Spanish labels above English descriptions will look half-finished to your client.

So write the descriptions in Spanish, and keep them short and concrete. A line reading Pintura de interiores: sala y comedor, dos capas at 16 hours and $45.00 an hour comes to $720.00, and a second line, Materiales: pintura y cinta, at $180.00 brings the subtotal to $900.00 before any tax. Your client sees at once what each amount is for. If your Spanish is shaky, have a Spanish-speaking friend or colleague check your usual descriptions once, and reuse them rather than translating every invoice from scratch.

Three details make a Spanish invoice read naturally. Use the formal usted form (su pago, le agradecemos) rather than tú, because an invoice is a business document even when the client is your neighbor. Write the month out in any date you type, such as del 3 al 7 de noviembre de 2026, since Spanish speakers put the day first and would read 11/03 as March 11. And say which currency you mean, because the $ sign is also used for the Mexican peso and other currencies; a note such as Importes en dólares estadounidenses (USD) removes any doubt.

The maker prints one language per invoice, so a bilingual invoice takes one of two routes. You can keep the labels in Spanish and write each description in both languages, Pintura de interiores / Interior painting, which works well when the person paying reads Spanish and your bookkeeper reads English. Or you can download the PDF in Spanish, switch the invoice language to English and download it again, which gives you two copies of the same invoice with the same number. Don't duplicate the invoice for this, because a duplicate is a new invoice that takes the next number, and one sale with two invoice numbers muddles your records and could even get paid twice.

Clients in Spain or Latin America

Everything above is about language. If your client lives in the US and simply prefers Spanish, the invoice is a US invoice in every other respect: it needs the same details as an English one, and whether you charge sales tax depends on your state and on what you sell, not on the language you write in. The page on invoices for US contractors and freelancers explains what to include.

A client in Spain, Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America is a different matter. Their country has its own tax and invoicing rules, and some of those can affect your invoice, for example a business client who needs its tax identification number on it, or who can only process invoices that arrive in a particular electronic format. This page doesn't cover those rules, because they differ from one country to the next and a general guide would do more harm than good. The simplest step is to ask your client, before the first invoice, what their accounts department needs to see; for larger or ongoing work, an accountant who knows that country can tell you whether anything applies on your side too.

It helps to be clear about what the maker can do for such a client. It produces a clean PDF in Spanish, and you can add the client's tax number in a custom field or switch the invoice to another currency, such as euros, if that's what you agreed. But the PDF is not an e-invoice, and the maker can't send invoices through any government e-invoicing system. If your client tells you they need an electronic invoice in their country's format, you'll need a different tool for that client.