Invoice template for Ghana: what a foreign template leaves out

Most free invoice templates come from the United States or the United Kingdom, where one tax sits on one line. Drop a Ghanaian supply into that shape and it stops being an invoice you can hand to a VAT-registered customer.

Rates and rules change. What follows is the shape of the document, not a substitute for the Ghana Revenue Authority or your accountant.

The tax is not one line

Alongside VAT itself, a Ghanaian invoice typically carries the National Health Insurance Levy, the Ghana Education Trust Fund levy and the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy. A template with a single “Tax” row cannot show them, so people do the one thing that breaks the document: add the percentages together and print one number.

That fails for two separate reasons. A customer reclaiming VAT needs the VAT component on its own, because the levies do not behave the same way. And the arithmetic differs: the levies are computed on the taxable value, and VAT is then computed on a base that includes them, so one combined rate gives a slightly different answer. On a small supply nobody notices. On a large one they do.

The identifiers a foreign template has no field for

• Your TIN, and your VAT registration number where you have one
• The customer’s TIN, which a business customer will expect to see
• Your registered business name, as registered, not as you trade

Cedis, and how they are written

Write the currency so it cannot be mistaken. GH₵ or GHS in full is safer than a bare symbol on a document that may be read abroad, and a template that hard-codes a dollar sign in the totals is a template that will eventually embarrass you.

What to do about it

Either find a template with a tax section that takes more than one row, or use something where the tax label and rate are yours to set and a levy can be added as its own line. Every design here does the second thing, and the tax label is a field rather than the word VAT printed into the layout.