Amount in words converter

An amount in words repeats the total in a form that is hard to alter and easy to check. Turning a 1 into a 7 takes one stroke. Turning one thousand into seven thousand takes rewriting the line. That is why cheques have always carried it, and why buyers in Pakistan, India and the Gulf still expect to see it under the total on an invoice, a receipt or a quotation.

The converter above takes a figure and a currency and writes it out in English for rupees, dirhams, riyals, dollars, pounds and euros. Copy the sentence and paste it under your total.

The conventions it follows

• The currency names the main unit and the minor unit: rupees and paise, dirhams and fils, riyals and halalas, dollars and cents, pounds and pence, euros and cents
• It ends with only, which closes the sentence so nothing can be added after it
• It puts and before the last part under a hundred, as British and South Asian accounts do: one hundred and five
• Numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine are hyphenated: forty-two, not forty two
• Singular where the figure is one: one dollar, one halala, one penny
• The minor unit is left out when it is zero, so 500.00 is five hundred rupees only

International system, not lakh and crore

This converter uses the international system: thousand, million, billion. It does not write lakh or crore. A Pakistani or Indian reader who would say twelve lakh thirty-four thousand will see one million two hundred and thirty-four thousand instead. Both describe the same number, and both are correct, but they are not interchangeable on a document where the reader expects one of them.

International wording is the safe default for invoices to foreign clients, export invoices and anything going to a bank abroad. For a domestic client who works in lakh and crore, or a cheque drawn on a local account, check what they expect. If they want lakh and crore, write the line yourself and use the converter to check the figure behind it.

Match the rounded total

The words must describe the total as printed, after tax and after rounding. If your invoice rounds a total of 1,050.495 to 1,050.50, the words say one thousand and fifty dirhams and fifty fils, not forty-nine. Write the words last, from the final figure, never from a subtotal.

Common mistakes

• Words that disagree with the figure. Where the two differ, many readers treat the words as the intended amount, so a slip here is worse than a typo in the total
• Writing the subtotal instead of the total including tax
• Mixing systems in one line: one million and five lakh is not a number anyone can read quickly
• Leaving off only, which leaves room for more words after the amount
• Forgetting the minor unit name, so 10.50 reads as ten rupees fifty, which could mean fifty paise or fifty rupees
• Using the wrong currency name: Saudi and Qatari riyals are spelled the same, so state the currency code beside the figure as well

Where it goes on the invoice

Put it directly under the grand total, on its own line, labelled Amount in words. One line is enough. It is a convention rather than a field the tax rules usually ask for, so it does not replace the figures. It is there to make them harder to misread.

The invoice builder on this site writes the amount in words for you from the same figures it prints, so the two cannot disagree. This page is for when you need the sentence somewhere else: a cheque, a contract, a payment voucher or a spreadsheet.

Large and small figures both work. The converter handles amounts into the trillions and down to a single minor unit, and it writes zero as zero rather than leaving the line blank.