Best invoice app for Australian sole traders: InvoiceMate vs Rounded vs Xero

• You send invoices, claim GST, and want to spend nothing: InvoiceMate. Unlimited invoices on the free plan, ABN and GST handled, 10 receipt scans a month.
• You want bank feeds, time tracking and a proper desktop app: Rounded. It costs more and has no free plan, but it does more.
• You have a bookkeeper, employees, or need to lodge BAS straight to the ATO: Xero. It is accounting software, priced accordingly.
• You want the simplest possible invoice generator and do not care about GST reporting: Invoice Simple. Note the free and entry tiers cap how many invoices you can send.

Prices as published on each provider's pricing page in September 2026. Xero's figure is the standard Grow price after its introductory discount. Plans, currencies and limits change often, so check each provider before deciding.

Xero is full double-entry accounting software. Bank feeds, reconciliation, payroll add-ons, multi-user access and direct BAS lodgement to the ATO. If you have a bookkeeper or an accountant who wants to log in beside you, this is the category-correct answer and the price reflects it. For a sole trader sending a handful of invoices a month, most of what you pay for sits unused.

Rounded is built specifically for Australian freelancers and sole traders, and it is the closest thing to a middle ground. Bank feeds, time tracking, quotes, and BAS calculated as you go on the Pro plan. There is no free tier, so the real comparison is roughly $24 to $30 a month against InvoiceMate's free plan, and the question is whether bank reconciliation and time tracking are worth that to you.

Invoice Simple is the most widely downloaded invoice app in this group and the simplest to start. The catch is the invoice cap: the entry plan allows three invoices a month, the next tier ten, and only the top plan is unlimited. It is also not built for Australian GST specifically, so BAS preparation is on you.

InvoiceMate is deliberately narrower. It creates ATO-compliant tax invoices with your ABN and GST, scans receipts, tracks expenses and exports BAS-ready summaries, from a phone, offline, with unlimited invoices on the free plan. It is not trying to be accounting software.

Monthly figures hide the difference. Over twelve months, at the entry tier of each, the gap is the size of a decent tool purchase:

None of this makes the expensive options bad. Xero at $936 a year is cheap next to a bookkeeper's time if you have the volume to justify it, and Rounded's bank feeds save real hours for someone reconciling dozens of transactions a month. The question is whether your business currently produces enough transactions for that to pay for itself. For a sole trader issuing under twenty invoices a month and doing their own BAS, usually it does not yet.

Worth asking before you start, because switching later is where people get stuck. Any tool you pick should let you export invoices and expense records in a format your accountant or the next app can read.

Xero exports comprehensively, as you would expect from accounting software, and most bookkeepers can migrate a Xero file without drama. Rounded exports invoices and expenses to CSV. InvoiceMate exports income, expense, GST and profit-and-loss summaries plus invoice PDFs, which covers the accountant handoff but is not a full accounting-file migration. Invoice Simple's export depends on the plan.

The practical rule: if a tool holds your records and cannot hand them back in a plain format, that is a reason to skip it, whatever else it does well.

Being specific about this is more useful than a feature list. Choose something else if:

• You want bank feeds and reconciliation. InvoiceMate has none. Expenses are entered or scanned, not matched against a bank statement. Rounded and Xero both do this.
• You need to lodge BAS from the app. InvoiceMate prepares the GST summary. Lodging still happens through the ATO portal or your accountant. Xero lodges directly.
• You bill by the hour and need time tracking. Not supported. Rounded is built around this.
• Your accountant needs their own login. There is no multi-user access. You export and send.
• You do your admin at a desk. InvoiceMate is mobile only today. Rounded, Xero and Invoice Simple all have web apps you can work in on a laptop.
• You want a long track record. Xero is an ASX-listed company, and Rounded and Invoice Simple have both been running for years. InvoiceMate is a Melbourne business and launched in 2026. If you would rather trust software with a decade behind it, that is a fair call.

Most receipt features described as "scanning" attach a photo to an expense record you still type out yourself. That is useful for evidence, but it does not save the typing, and it does not help with GST.

This matters at BAS time because an Australian receipt frequently mixes GST and GST-free items on the one docket. A supermarket run for a job can carry both. If your app records only a total, the GST split is something you work out by hand later, or guess.

InvoiceMate's scan reads the merchant, date and amount, and separates the GST component including GST-free lines. Xero also extracts data from receipts. Rounded attaches the photo. Whatever you choose, it is worth testing this on a real, crumpled receipt before you commit, rather than the clean sample in a product demo.

Keeping those records matters regardless of tool: the ATO generally requires a tax invoice to claim a GST credit on a purchase over $82.50 including GST.

1. Do you need bank reconciliation? If yes, the shortlist is Rounded or Xero and the rest of this does not apply.
2. Does anyone else need to log in? If yes, Xero.
3. Are you GST-registered? If yes, rule out tools that treat GST as a generic tax field, because BAS preparation becomes manual work every quarter.
4. How many invoices a month? Under three, almost anything works. Above that, check the cap on the plan you are actually going to pay for, not the one on the marketing page.
5. Where do you do admin? On a phone between jobs, or at a desk. This decides more than any feature comparison.

For a GST-registered sole trader who invoices from the ute and wants BAS-time records without a subscription, InvoiceMate covers it. For anyone whose books need to reconcile against a bank account, it does not, and no amount of feature comparison changes that.