Trucking Invoices in Canada: What to Include to Get Paid

The fields every freight invoice needs

• Your business: legal name, address, phone, billing email.
• The customer: the broker or shipper’s billing name and address, exactly as their accounts payable team has it.
• An invoice number and date, unique and in sequence.
• The customer’s references: their load number, plus the PO, BOL or pickup numbers from the rate confirmation. A missing reference is one of the most common reasons an invoice sits unpaid.
• The move: origin and destination, pickup and delivery dates.
• Charges as separate lines: line haul, fuel surcharge if separate, and each accessorial on its own line.
• Tax: the GST/HST (or GST plus QST) rate, the amount, and your registration number.
• The total, the currency and the payment terms: CAD or USD, and when payment is due.
• Where to pay: your remittance details, or the factoring company’s if the invoice is assigned to one.

GST/HST on trucking invoices

If your business is registered for GST/HST, freight you invoice inside Canada generally carries it. The rate depends on the provinces involved: 13% HST in Ontario, 15% in the Atlantic HST provinces, 5% GST in Alberta, and 5% GST plus QST in Quebec. Freight that crosses the border is often zero-rated, which means no tax is charged but the invoice should still say so.

The Canada Revenue Agency also sets what your customer needs to see before it can claim the tax back as an input tax credit. On invoices of $100 or more, that includes your GST/HST registration number and the tax charged; on invoices of $500 or more, also the customer’s name, the payment terms and a description of the service. Missing it gives the customer a reason to send the invoice back.

Tax rules for cross-border and interprovincial freight have exceptions. Confirm your setup with your accountant; this guide is not tax advice.

Putting accessorials on the invoice

Detention, layover, TONU, lumper fees and extra stops get paid when each one stands on its own line with what supports it:

• Detention: the stop, arrival and departure times, the free time, the billable time and the hourly rate. The arithmetic is in how to calculate detention charges.
• Layover and TONU: the date, and a reference to the message where the customer moved or cancelled the load. See detention vs layover vs TONU.
• Lumper fees: the amount and the receipt attached.

Do not fold accessorials into the line-haul rate. A broker can approve a clean freight line and question one accessorial, but a single mixed number gets the whole invoice held.

What to send with it

Most brokers want a package, not a single PDF:

• The invoice.
• The signed proof of delivery for every delivery stop.
• The rate confirmation, if the customer asks for it.
• Receipts for any reimbursed charge, such as lumpers or scale tickets.

Send it to the billing address the rate confirmation names, the same day the POD comes in if you can. Every day the invoice waits is a day added to when you get paid.

Templates or trucking invoice software

A Word or Excel trucking invoice template works for a handful of loads a week. It breaks down when the numbers have to be copied from somewhere else: the rate from an email, the times from a text, the detention from a calculator. That copying is where the mistakes come from.

Invoice software for carriers builds the invoice from the load record instead. In Zonox, a completed load’s invoice PDF carries the customer’s PO or reference number, the freight charge, a separate line for each stop with confirmed detention, your tax rate and registration number, and the currency, with tax switched off per load when the move is zero-rated.