WooCommerce Invoice Tutorial: How to Set Up PDF Invoices for Free

Are you looking for a way to send a WooCommerce invoice PDF when someone places an order on your website?

By default, WooCommerce already offers a function to send email invoices when selling online. However, this functionality is limited to simple, preset email designs. It also doesn’t offer a PDF option for printing or downloading, and there’s no easy way to send invoices to customers manually.

That’s why in this article we’re going to walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to send a WooCommerce invoice with settings for attaching PDFs, sending to customers manually, and customizing the invoice design.

Best of all, you can set up this functionality with one free plugin. Let’s dig…

How to send a WooCommerce invoice

In a previous article, we covered the best invoicing plugins for WordPress. We encourage you to explore all of these, but for this tutorial we chose the free WooCommerce PDF Invoices and Packing Slips plugin because…

1. It offers an outstanding feature list despite being free.
2. It’s very popular and highly rated – it’s active on over 300,000 websites with a perfect 5-star rating in over 1,200 reviews.

How to set it up…

1. Install a WooCommerce invoice plugin

Install and activate first the WooCommerce PDF invoice and packing slip plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

If you need help with this, use our guide to installing a WordPress plugin. You should also make sure you have WooCommerce installed before attempting to use this plugin.

2. Run the setup wizard

You can find the plugin settings by clicking on WooCommerce > PDF Invoices in your WordPress dashboard.

The plugin offers many settings that you can use to adapt it to your situation. Luckily, the WooCommerce PDF Invoice plugin offers a setup wizard to complete most of the process.

To get started, click the Run the setup wizard Button.

3. Put your company name, address and logo on the invoice

The setup wizard will walk you through the most important settings you need for your default WooCommerce invoice.

For example, in the first step you will be asked to enter the name of your store and its address. The plugin adds these details on your invoice.

Fill out these fields and click Next.

Your company logo on the invoice is also important.

In the next window click on the set picture Button to upload a logo.

This logo appears as a preview on the screen and is also integrated into your PDF invoices by the plugin.

click Next.

4. Attach the invoice to specific ecommerce emails

WooCommerce already sends out emails for important events like new orders, canceled orders, and refunded orders.

However, none of them have attached a downloadable PDF invoice, so now is the time to specify which ones should include those invoices.

It’s not a bad idea to attach the invoice to every email sent for an order. However, you can choose to remove the WooCommerce invoice from some emails if needed.

click Next keep going.

Note: One of the more important choices is the Customer invoice / order details (manual email) box as this is one of the easiest ways to manually send your PDF invoices.

5. Select display options to display the paper size and action buttons on the invoice

the display options Section lists several items like contact information and billing information that you can include in your WooCommerce PDF invoice.

We recommend including them all, unless you don’t want the customer’s phone number or email address on the invoice.

click Next.

You can also indicate which paper format you would like for the invoice. These determine how the invoice is printed out.

Go with one A4 or letter format, and then click Next.

Sometimes you have to send an email manually. This is a common practice in B2B sales. It’s also wonderful when a customer misplaces an invoice or doesn’t receive it the first time.

Regardless of the reason, you can enable action buttons in this section. When you enable action buttons, you get a new option in WooCommerce Orders List that allows you to manually send an invoice to specific customers with the click of a button.

If you find that you need to send invoices manually on a regular basis, you should definitely enable this option.

Once you check the Show action buttons Click on the box Next Button.

And that’s all the setup wizard has to offer. Most of your WooCommerce invoice settings are now complete.

press the Finished Button to return to the dashboard.

6. Change order actions to send email invoices

After you configure your invoices, two things happen:

1. The plugin automatically attaches PDF invoices to any automated order emails you selected in the setup wizard (such as order confirmations, cancellations, and shipping confirmations).
2. The plugin adds new options to the WooCommerce order management interface so you can send invoices manually when needed.

So you can rest assured that the PDF invoices are attached to the automated emails. You can even run some test jobs to see if they work.

However, you also have the option to resend these emails and customize order actions with the included PDF invoices.

To do this, open an order in WooCommerce (go to WooCommerce > Orders and select an order from the list).

Go to order promotions section and select the drop down menu.

You can now perform the following actions:

• Email invoice/order details to customer
• Resend notification of new order
• Regenerate download permissions

For example, if you choose one of the first two options, you can resend an order email with an invoice or send it manually.

The WooCommerce email goes to the customer’s inbox as usual, but they also receive a PDF invoice below.

When a buyer clicks on the invoice, it is downloaded to their computer or viewed in their browser.

As you can see, the plugin automatically adds all the elements from the setup wizard to the invoice, including the invoice number, invoice date, logo and company address.

If you want to change the template for your invoice, you can do so later.

7. Automatically or manually send order emails with WooCommerce invoices

In addition to the order actions, you can continue to use the Send order email Module. This is no different from what is already in WooCommerce, but each of the emails now has the invoice attached.

For example, if you enabled attaching the invoice to order cancellation emails in the setup wizard, the plugin will automatically attach the PDF invoice when you use it Send order email Module for sending an email with a canceled order:

8. Create a PDF WooCommerce Invoice or Packing Slip to print or download

The last area worth looking into is how to print or download a WooCommerce invoice on your own computer. You may want to store these invoices in your accounting files, or you may need to download the files and send them to customers.

As a bonus, you can download and print packing slips in PDF format.

Find them for both of them Generate PDF module on each order page.

press the PDF invoice button or the PDF delivery note click to download these documents.

You can then click the Download button to save it to your computer or the Print button to send the file to a connected printer.

The delivery note is no different in terms of download and printing options.

It’s really just a simpler version of the invoice that removes information like pricing.

If you want to automate this process, you can use the premium WooCommerce Automatic Order Printing (PrintNode) plugin by Simba hosting. This plugin has an integration so you can automatically print a packing slip or invoice as soon as an order comes in. However, it costs £55 for use on a single website.

9. Add optional notes to your invoices

Another way to customize your WooCommerce invoice is to place notes at the end of the document.

As with other actions, you can add notes when you have an order open in your dashboard.

Find the PDF document data section, and then click to edit it Remarks Field. Enter any information you want the customer to see, e.g. B. Return details, a quick thank you, or specific instructions for the product.

If a PDF invoice goes to the customer or if you print out an invoice yourself, the plugin automatically adds the note to the invoice.

10. Change all settings (if necessary) for your WooCommerce invoice and packing slip

The initial setup wizard does the heavy lifting, but it’s possible you’ll want to change what you’ve previously entered or add new settings.

To control all of this, go to WooCommerce > PDF invoices.

the General Tab offers additional settings for things like:

• Change how PDFs are displayed.
• Running a test mode.
• Adding terms and conditions or policies in the footer.
• Choose a different template for your PDF invoice to change the design. If you want to access more invoice templates/themes, the developer sells a pack of premium templates for €39.

Under the documents tab, you can edit settings by clicking invoice Shortcut.

Here you can disable invoices, show a delivery address, remove the email address or change which of the emails the invoice is attached to.

Last the delivery note Section shows settings for:

• Activate or deactivate delivery notes.
• Display of a billing address
• An email will appear.
• Display of a phone number.
• View Notes.

Set up your WooCommerce invoice today

The setup wizard should help you configure most of the basics, but we recommend playing around with the settings (and running some tests) to ensure all your WooCommerce invoice items look perfect.

To find some other plugins that will make your store even better, you can check out our full roundup of the best WooCommerce plugins.