How To Create PDF Invoices in WordPress [5 Steps!]

Would you like to create PDF invoices in WordPress for your online business automatically? Formidable Form’s custom PDF generator can do it! Here’s how.

Approximate read time: 5 minutes

If you run an online business, accept online donations for your charity, or sell event tickets, you know how hard it can be to keep track of invoices.

Making invoices individually can be a pain — and time-consuming — and unfortunately, automatically generating invoices in WordPress isn’t easy. It’s even harder to make them look good. But we know a few tricks to save time and make record-keeping easy. And we'll show you how to create PDF invoices in WordPress today.

Let's get started.

Why Create PDF Invoices in WordPress?

You may want to generate an invoice in WordPress for many reasons. 

For starters, reassuring your customers and providing necessary information regarding their order is great.

Offering a downloadable PDF invoice on the purchase confirmation page or instantly sending the PDF document to customers via email after their order is completed also gives your site credibility and confirms that you successfully received their orders.

Creating PDF invoices in WordPress can also save your team time and help you keep track of business records by automatically attaching PDF invoices to internal order email notifications.

Why Use a WordPress Invoice Plugin for PDF?

Unfortunately, there’s no great way to automatically create an invoice in WordPress without an invoice plugin, especially if you aren’t already using WooCommerce automatic order printing. You’ll need a developer to do a lot of coding and configuring.

Using WordPress invoice plugins for PDF is a much cheaper and easier option. Most of these plugins let you create and customize PDF invoices in WordPress without writing a single line of code. Plus, many integrate to handle your WooCommerce orders, so that's no problem!

But there are a lot of invoice plugins out there. How do you know which one to choose?

What to Look for in a WordPress PDF Invoice Plugin

So, what features should you look for in a WordPress invoice PDF plugin?

• A drag-and-drop invoice builder with a style editor to change colors, font size, etc.
• The possibility to make invoices for all your methods of payment
• The ability to use data from form fields to fill in your PDF invoice
• Custom fields to personalize your invoice with your logo, a header, and a footer

Formidable Forms offers all these features and more! ✅

Our plugin lets you automatically generate PDF invoices from WordPress form entries and quickly build custom forms and PDFs in our drag-and-drop builders. Formidable makes downloading, exporting, or displaying data from form submissions easy. 

How to Make PDF Invoices in WordPress

If you’re using one of Formidable’s supported payment add-ons like Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.net, it only takes a few steps to create PDF invoices in WordPress:

Don’t want to read our step-by-step instructions below? Instead, check out this video to learn how to create a custom PDF from form entries.

1. Install and activate Formidable Forms

First, install and activate the Formidable Forms plugin. Once the plugin is installed, go to Formidable → Add-Ons to install and activate the PDF and Visual Views Add-Ons.

Both of these add-ons are included in the Formidable Business Plan.

2. Create your form

Next, create the form you’ll use to fill in your invoice. Formidable’s visual form editor and pre-built templates make this super simple.

Start by opening Formidable. Then click the + Add New button in the upper right corner to create a new form.

In the pop-up window, search for and select our Invoice PDF template to get up and running immediately, or select "Blank Form" to start from scratch.

Let's make things easy on ourselves and pick the template! You can customize this to include fields you may need, like a shipping address or other fields.

Next, select the Invoice PDF application and click to install it.

Hang on a minute. Do you need to install an application? Don't worry; we call these ready-made solutions, which combine forms and views.

Open the application, and you'll see the form and grid view, which are ready to personalize or embed!

Hover over the form name to customize your PDF invoice form and select "Edit." This opens up our drag-and-drop form builder, where you can insert, edit, or remove form fields.

Whenever you’re finished, click the blue Update button in the upper right corner to save your changes.

3. Create a View and design your invoice

Select the Views tab at the top of the form builder to find your PDF invoice template. Like with the form, you can hover over the template name and hit "Edit" to customize it.

Then, use the PDF editor and builder to change the design of your invoice. Hit Update to save your changes!

4. Add your PDF invoice shortcode into pages, posts, emails, or confirmation messages

You can find your PDF ID on the left side of your screen.

Next, copy the shortcode and paste it into the post, page, confirmation message, or email form action to display your invoice. 

If you want, you can take it one step further and create a download PDF button or show a link to let your customers download the PDF invoice. 

You can also automatically send the PDF as an email attachment by selecting the Email form actions.

Then, copy and paste this shortcode into your email message:

[frm-pdf view="x" entry="[id]" public="1"]

Just put your view ID number in place of the “x”. You’ll find the view ID under the Views tab of your form.

If you need help getting your PDF download to work, dig into our Knowledge Base docs!

5. Publish your form

All left is embed your form into any page or post you’d like! This bit’s easy — from the Forms tab in Formidable, click the embed button </> next to the form you’d like to use. 

You can then choose to insert your form into a new page, an existing page, or copy and paste the shortcode to add the form wherever you want it.

What about PDF WooCommerce Invoices?

Out of the box, WooCommerce does not offer fully customizable PDF invoices. It can be difficult to make WooCommerce receipts and invoices match your brand’s identity. There’s no true invoice builder; you must use CSS to change font sizes or colors.

Your best bet is to install one of the WooCommerce plugins for now. The free WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips plugin is one of our favorites. It comes with a ready-to-use PDF invoice template that makes sending them in WooCommerce emails easy.

What Else Can You Do with Formidable?

Formidable is much more than just an invoice plugin! That is true; you can use it as a WordPress PDF invoice generator. You can also use it to create registration forms, online calculators, shipping labels, product quizzes, questionnaires, PDF certificates, and more.

Discover everything Formidable can do for you!

And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and right here on our blog for more great WordPress tips and tricks!

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