Manual Invoicing: A Time-Consuming Relic
Meet John: the owner of a deli shop. His business has embraced the digital age and thrives on selling a variety of gourmet products through a WordPress website and an order form powered by Gravity Forms. Despite his digital advancements, John is still manually handling invoices/receipts when orders are made, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. To make matters worse, some of his products can fall under different tax rates, making the process more error-prone.
Believe it or not, this common challenge plagues many business owners to this very day. Entrepreneurs like John often find themselves bogged down; too busy working in their business instead of focusing on their business. Just imagine if John freed up all that time and dedicated it to business growth and customer satisfaction. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Automated Invoicing: Focus on What Matters
So how does John solve this problem? Three words: Gravity PDF Invoices. Available in six designs, these Gravity PDF templates are packed with a ton of features that turn any invoicing nightmare into beautifully crafted PDFs – automated and ready to go. By integrating Gravity PDF with his existing Gravity Forms setup, John now automates tax invoices without lifting a finger.
In this guide I’ll show you how easy it is to ditch manual invoicing by using Gravity Forms and Gravity PDF Invoices. You will learn how to set up PDF invoices on your forms, customize them to your liking, and account for multiple tax rates – all without breaking a sweat. The goal is to ensure that every invoice is accurate and presentable.
1. Getting the Order Form Ready
Already built a form in Gravity Forms with Pricing Fields? That’s fantastic! You can skip this step. If you’re new to Gravity Forms, or haven’t built an order form yet, here are the four things you need to get your very own order form up and running:
- Basic customer information, such as name, email, phone, and address
- Appropriate product, option, shipping, and total fields for your business
- A payment feed set up with a payment processor of your choice e.g. Stripe, PayPal, or Square
- A notification email to be sent to the user upon a completed payment
Gravity Forms have written an in depth article on how to build an order form, so I won’t bother rehashing the same information. If you prefer to skip most of this step, you can download the form export file (right-click and save as) and then import it onto your site. Once imported, you should configure your chosen payment gateway.
2. Setting up your Invoice
First, purchase and download a Gravity PDF Invoice. These invoices are fully customizable and come with a variety of features. Choose one that suits your needs, and let’s get started.
Gravity PDF Invoices are feature-rich, highly customizable templates you can personalize from top to bottom. I’m going to use Invoice Classic, but you can follow along with any of the invoice templates we have available – they are interchangeable.
To install your new template, first go to the form list page. Hover over the form you want to create an invoice for, and hover on the Settings link. Then, select the PDF menu item that appears, and click Add New to add a new PDF template.
When the new page loads, locate the Template dropdown and select the Manage button just beside it. This will bring up the PDF Template Manager. Drag and drop the template zip file you downloaded earlier into the Add new template box and wait for the installation to complete. You can then select the new template to close the modal window.
The invoices have a lot of settings you can configure. To make this easier for you, I have divided the setup process into two main sections:
- Common Settings – covers the basic PDF setup
- Template Settings – focuses on invoice-specific settings
Common Settings
The initial process of setting up an invoice is the same as any other PDF. All PDF templates share common settings, which are grouped into the General, Appearance, and Advanced sections. The Template section is unique to the chosen template (more on that later).
Let’s start with the General Section, where you’ll need to complete the two required fields when creating a new PDF: Label and Filename. Then, click on the Template dropdown option and select the invoice template you installed in the previous step. Under Notifications, select the notification you want the invoice to be automatically sent to. Don’t worry if you haven’t set the email notification up yet. You can always come back and edit the PDF settings later.
Next, go to the Appearance section and choose the font you want. If you are unsure which font to pick, select the recommended font for the invoice template you are using – you can find this information in the documentation or from the description in the PDF Template Manager. The recommended font for Invoice Classic is PT Serif, which is auto-installed with the template.
We aren’t going to make any changes under the Advanced section (the defaults will be suitable), and you can skip these.
Template Settings
The settings shown in the Template section are determined by the Gravity PDF template you choose. This flexibility allows Gravity PDF to adapt and create personalized documents to suit specific use-cases. All Gravity PDF Invoice templates support the same features, which means you can switch to another design without needing to reconfigure everything.
Now, let’s go through each section so you can get the most out of Gravity PDF Invoices!
Company Information
Let’s begin by configuring the company details, such as the logo, business information, and contact details. Upload your company’s logo and adjust its position and appearance to match your preferences. Complete this section by adding any extra info you need, such as more contact details or links to your social media.
Pro Tip: You can use Gravity Forms merge tags anywhere in the Invoice settings to dynamically populate entry data.
Invoice Settings
The invoice settings section is where you set the invoice number and the invoice date. The Invoice Number will default to the unique (but not sequential) entry ID number Gravity Forms assigns to every form submission. If your business is obligated to use sequential invoice numbering we recommend using Gravity Perk’s Unique ID plugin.
Once you’ve configured the Invoice number, you can move on to setting up the invoice date. The Invoice Creation Date defaults to the entry submission date, but you can change it using merge tags if you wish. Next, select from the dropdown how you want the date formatted when displayed in the invoice.
If your customers aren’t paying during form submission, and you want to add a due date to the invoice, you can configure the Invoice Due Date setting. As I’ve set up a payment gateway on the form, I’m going to leave this set to 0.
Buyer Information
This section is where you customize the buyer’s details, such as their name, address, registration number, and contact information. You would capture this information in your form, and then use Gravity Forms merge tags in the appropriate invoice settings.
Tax Settings
Gravity Forms doesn’t have a built-in way to automatically manage taxes for Pricing Fields. You could use a Product Calculation field to calculate taxes if you use tax-exclusive pricing, or a Number Calculation field for prices that are tax-inclusive. However, this approach means you have to manually update these calculations every time you add or remove products to your form. For more complex forms this can be very cumbersome.
To solve this problem, Gravity PDF Invoices has native support for tax-inclusive pricing and can auto calculate and display the taxes you define. If your country uses tax-exclusive pricing, we recommend Gravity Perks eCommerce Fields plugin, which includes a Tax field that does all the number-crunching for you. And for our EU-friends, PDF Invoices does support the EU VAT plugin. So you’ve lots of options!
John the Deli owner uses tax-inclusive pricing, which means the price shown to his customers is what they actually pay at the register. Let’s see how to use the native invoice tax features in Gravity PDF Invoices to make taxes… less taxing.
To enable taxes in your invoice check the Tax Inclusive Pricing box, and set a tax name and rate. The Default Tax Rate is applied to all products in your order form and will be used to calculate the tax that applies to an order. I’m going to set the tax rate to 7%, which means if a customer purchases a $100 product then the PDF Invoice will calculate the tax as $6.54. The Default Tax Name will display alongside the calculated tax amount.
tax-12-Luxury to the Custom CSS Class field of the Artisanal Chocolate’s product field in the Form Editor. This will tell the invoice to apply a 12% rate to that one product, with “Luxury” as the label. You can find out more about multiple-tax rates in the documentation. Extras
Invoices can also display discounts on the PDF. But first, you need to add a discount field. You can use either the Coupon field from Gravity Forms or the Discount field from Gravity Wiz.
You can change how these discounts are shown by toggling the Itemized Discounts / Coupons setting, which shows them either grouped together or shown separately.
The rest of the settings under Extras help make your invoices look professional and more informative. Feel free to add additional information such as payment terms or notes, and insert footer text at the bottom of each page.
Labels
This section is pretty straightforward — change any text labels in your invoice PDF. This includes labels for the invoice title, date, and due date, and more. By default, invoices have preset labels, but you can change or remove any of them. This is a very useful feature that lets you translate the invoice into your native language, making sure it fits well with your clients and looks professional.
Once you’ve changed the labels in your invoice, click Update PDF to save all the changes.
3. Testing the Invoice
Great job on finishing the configuration and personalization part! Now let’s make sure everything works perfectly. Go to the order form’s Entries List Page and submit a test entry. Once submitted, revisit the Form List Page, locate your test entry, click View PDF, and give yourself a pat on the back for creating an impressive invoice. ✨
Remember, if there’s any aspect of the invoice you’re not satisfied with, you can always tweak the PDF invoice settings and reload the PDF. No need to worry because Gravity PDF will regenerate the document with your new settings. Play around with it, the sky’s the limit!
4. Wrapping Up
Wow, you’ve come a long way! Now that you know how to create PDF invoices from your Gravity Forms entries, you can say goodbye to manual invoicing. Enjoy the extra time you’ve freed up to focus on more important parts of your business.
If you’re interested in other ways you can use Gravity PDF to automate your business processes, we suggest reviewing other articles in our How To series. If you want to hear directly from other fellow Gravity PDF users, we also have a video Case Study series worth checking out.
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