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How To: Easily and Effortlessly Combine Multiple Gravity Forms Entries into a PDF

Included text: How To Easily and Effortlessly Combine Multiple Gravity Forms Entries. Accompanied by artwork of a book with a question mark on the cover, which serves as the logo for the Gravity PDF How To series.
Learn how to combine multiple Gravity Forms entries into a single, organized PDF using Gravity PDF and the Bulk Generator extension.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses of all sizes face the challenge of managing a growing volume of data. Whether it’s client invoices, processing student applications, or handling customer agreements; dealing with a sea of disorganized information can quickly become a major bottleneck.

Drowning in Digital Documents

Meet Maria: she’s a bakery owner whose seen great success with her website’s online ordering system. But the growing volume of orders has brought unexpected challenges. Maria uses Gravity Forms to power her online orders on her WordPress website. As the orders have increased, she’s found herself spending hours each week on administrative tasks. If she want’s to scale up, Maria needs to automate and fast!

A Singular PDF Solution

One of Maria’s time-consuming tasks is to manually produce invoices for each order. Determined to break free from this tedious routine, Maria types “Gravity Forms Invoice” into her browser address bar to research her options. Almost immediately she stumbles upon a plugin that checks every box: Gravity PDF.

Maria’s search revealed that Gravity PDF is:

  1. ✅ A well-supported WordPress plugin that seamlessly integrates with Gravity Forms to automatically generate dynamic PDF documents
  2. ✅ Has six premium invoice designs to choose from, with support for Gravity Forms Pricing fields, taxes and discounts
  3. ✅ Can send PDF invoices as an email attachment to customers
  4. ✅ With an extension/add-on it can bulk generate and merge invoices into a single PDF document

Unlocking Automation

With Gravity PDF having all the features Maria needed, she easily downloaded, installed, and activated it on her website. As she reviewed the plugin’s documentation, she was pleased to discover that it required no complex setups or coding knowledge. She simply followed the instructions to purchase, install, and personalize Invoice Nova. Adding Gravity PDF to her workflow allowed branded invoices to be automatically generated for each order and sent directly to Maria’s customers. No more manual invoice creation!

Recognizing the potential of Gravity PDF’s extensions, Maria went a step further by adding Bulk Generator to her toolkit. It’s a powerful plugin that makes it easy to combine multiple invoices into a single, organized PDF file. The result dramatically transformed her admin workflow, saving her countless of hours.

Let me walk you through this process so you can automate your own PDF documents

Step 0: Install and Activate Essential Plugins

If you’d like to follow along with this guide, you’ll need four essential tools installed on your WordPress site:

  1. Gravity Forms: Creates the forms that capture your data. You can from the Gravity Forms website.
  2. Gravity PDF: Generates PDF documents from your form submissions. You can
  3. PDF Invoice: A premium Gravity PDF template used to generate invoice and receipt documents. I’ll be using Invoice Nova for this guide, but you can pick any of the designs (they all have the same features).
  4. Bulk Generator: Lets you bulk export multiple form entries or combine them into a single file. You can get a copy from the Gravity PDF online store and follow our installation guide for Gravity PDF extensions to install it.
Want to follow along?
Grab an Invoice and the Bulk Generator extension.
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1. Creating the Form

To get started we first need to build an order form with Gravity Forms. We’ll call ours “Online Bakery Order Form”. At a minimum the form needs to include Pricing fields and have a Gravity Forms payment add-ons configured (e.g. Stripe, PayPal, or Square). It should also collect customer information like name, email, phone number, and address.
A screenshot of the Gravity Forms Form Editor showing an order form being configured. The form displays product fields, with one field selected to configure its choices.

A Date Filter

Once the order form is in use we’ll want to filter and generate invoices in bulk based on the year and month. While Gravity Forms saves the submission date with every entry, it offers limited filtering options on the Entry List page. For example, you cannot specifically filter all entries submitted last month using the native submission date. To provide more date-based filtering options we’re going to add a new field to store the date in a different format. Don’t worry if this seems a bit confusing now, everything will become clear when we reach the PDF merging section of this guide (part 4).
A screenshot of the Gravity Forms Form Editor showing a Single Line Text field labeled "Month Filter" highlighted in orange. The Field Settings panel on the right displays the Default Value set to {today:format:Y-m-d}, also highlighted in orange. An orange arrow connects the two.

Go ahead and add a Single Line Text field to the form, then set its default value to {today:format:Y-m-d}. This will automatically record the submission date in YYYY-MM-DD format. You’ll also want to set the field visibility to Administrative, so it cannot be seen or edited by users filling out the form.

Once you’ve finished adding your fields make sure you use the Save Form button. At this point you should take your time to set up the Confirmation message(s), Notification(s), and payment feed. We’ll do the Invoice PDF setup next.

Want to follow along? Right-click and save the pre-built form and then import onto your website.

2. Configuring the Invoice PDF

Gravity PDF Invoices are highly customizable. This guide walks you through the key settings for creating an invoice. While I won’t cover every single option, this overview will get you started with Invoice Nova. To get started, navigate to Forms and select the form Online Bakery Order Form. Then go to Settings → PDF and select the Add New PDF button. While most PDF settings are common across all templates (General, Appearance, Advanced), the Template section is unique to each template.

General

A screenshot of the General section in the Invoice PDF settings. The section shows fields for adding a label, selecting a template, configuring notifications, setting a filename, and toggling the conditional logic.
Let’s start by filling in the required fields in the General Section: Label and Filename. Next you need to select Invoice Nova from the Template dropdown (or what ever invoice you installed). If you haven’t installed one yet, purchase your favorite from the template store, download the zip file, and upload through the PDF Template Manager. You should finish up in the General section by selecting the Notification email(s) you want the PDF attached to.

Appearance

A screenshot of the Appearance section in the Invoice PDF settings. The section displays options for configuring paper size, orientation, font type, font size, font color, and right-to-left text support.
Next, choose your paper size, orientation, font, and font size/color. I select the recommended font for Invoice Nova, but chose what ever takes your fancy – there are no rules here! If you’re language requires it, you can also enable right-to-left support.

Template Settings

A screenshot displays the Template section of the Invoice Nova PDF settings in Gravity PDF. It includes options to change the primary and secondary colors, upload and position a company logo, as well as fields to enter the business name and address.
Within the Template settings, you can extensively customize your invoices. This includes sections for configuring company information, invoice numbers and dates, buyer details, tax calculations (including support for tax-inclusive pricing and more), discounts, and invoice labels. You can use Gravity Forms merge tags throughout these settings to dynamically populate data from form submissions. Here are some of the template-specific settings I adjusted for this guide:
  1. Primary and Secondary Colors: I used #e3b282 for the primary and #ffcac9 for the secondary color.
  2. Logo: You can download this test logo (right click and save) and add it to the Logo field.
  3. Labels: I changed the following labels:
    • Title Label to Sales Invoice
    • Total Cost Summary Label to Invoice Amount
    • Buyer Details Label to Client Information
    • Description Column Label to Particulars
If you’re interested in learning more about how powerful and flexible Invoices can be, we’ve got another great How To guide that goes into more detail. You can skip the Advanced section for now. The default settings are typically suitable. Once you’re happy with the configuration, click the Update PDF button to save all your changes.
Still using manual invoicing?
Get a Gravity PDF Invoice and start automating your invoicing system.
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3. Testing the PDF

Now that you’ve finished configuring and personalizing your PDF, it’s time to test it out! Go to your form’s Entries List Page and submit a test entry. Once submitted, revisit the Form List Page, locate the test entry, and click the View PDF link. This should generate a PDF invoice similar to the one below.
A screenshot of the final generated invoice PDF. The invoice includes a detailed list of products purchased, along with individual prices. The total price is prominently displayed at the bottom, summarizing all charges.
If you need to change anything you can just go back to the PDF settings, make the necessary tweaks, and reload. Gravity PDF templates are designed to give you complete control. Mix and match settings to suit your needs!

4. Searching and filtering multiple entries

Now that we have an invoice dynamically generated for each order, let’s combine all invoices for last month into a single document. You can do this from the Entry List page with the Gravity PDF Bulk Generator extension.
A screenshot of the Gravity Forms Entry List. The search and filter is set to "Month Filter contains 2025-02" and is highlighted in orange.

Remember the Single Line Text Field (Month Filter) we added in Step 1? We’ll use this to filter our entries by month. In the top-right dropdown menu select Month Filter in the first dropdown (or whichever label you gave it). Choose contains as the condition in the second dropdown. In the text box enter the desired year and month using the appropriate date format. For example, entering 2025-02 will filter and show all orders submitted in February 2025. Click Search to display all entries from that specified month.

You can filter entries by various criteria including date, address, email and payment status. Check our guide to learn more about filtering options when using the Bulk Generator.

5. Merging PDF entries in one file

Okay, so now we’ve filtered the entries we need it’s time to merge them into a single PDF file!
A screenshot of the Gravity Forms Entry List showing the bulk actions dropdown menu. The "Download PDF" option is highlighted in orange, with the cursor hovering over it.
Select the checkbox in the first column to select all entries. If you have multiple pages of entries you’ll see a link that says Select all X entries. Click the link to select all orders. You can then open the Bulk actions dropdown, choose Download PDF, and select Apply.
A screenshot of the Bulk Generator Step 1 Configure window, showing the "Merge PDFs" option toggled on and highlighted in orange.
The Bulk Generator dialog box will open and allow you to select and merge the Invoice PDFs. The default action is to create and zip all the PDFs, so make sure you enable the Merge PDFsoption before running the Build.
A screenshot of the Bulk Generator Step 2 Build window, showing a loading animation at 90% progress with text at the bottom stating "Building the PDFs"
After the build process finishes, the combined Invoice PDFs will be downloaded by your browser as a single document. When you open the PDF you’ll see all the February 2025 orders combined and organized into one neat and tidy document. Pretty amazing, right?
A screenshot of the final generated invoice PDF file opened in a viewer window displaying two PDFs on the currently selected page. The left side of the viewer window shows additional PDFs.

6. Wrapping Up

After the build process finishes, the combined Invoice PDFs will be downloaded by your browser as a single document. When you open the PDF you’ll see all the February 2025 orders combined and organized into one neat and tidy document. Pretty amazing, right? 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. If you liked this How To Guide don’t forget to share it on your social media of choice. Happy PDFing!
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Picture of Dan Tabifranca
Dan Tabifranca
Dan Tabifranca, Marketing Director at Gravity PDF, is a WordPress community advocate with a creative spirit. His seasoned experience as a professional Chef and his passion for gaming fuel his constant pursuit of new adventures.