Can customers generate their own invoices?
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My company sells online classes. The majority of our clients cannot directly purchase a course they are interested in. The client instead needs to obtain a physical invoice for the class of interest and submit that invoice to their accounting department for approval. Then someone from accounting goes ahead and purchases the class one behalf of the client, often directly through our website. This makes the invoice obsolete from our end and we have to cancel it. The purpose of the invoice is ONLY for these accounting departments to have a physical record of what it is that the client is asking them to pay for.
The process of exchanging emails between clients and accounting departments, and generating invoices that later become moot is extremely time consuming. It would be wonderful if a client could generate an invoice themselves on our website. For example, they could simply click a class (or product) they are interested in, click a button that says “generate invoice,” maybe fill out a few fields, and then that’s it. They’d have generated their own invoice, or even a quote, to give to their accounting department and we don’t have to be involved nor waste all of that time.
Does anyone know of a way to do this? Perhaps a plugin that allows customers to generate their own invoices? Thank you in advance for any advice!
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Hi there,
It appears you are asking about a self-hosted site. In this case, your best option is to contact your current hosting service for more assistance.
If you happen to be using WooCommerce for an online store, there are additional plugins that can add an invoicing feature. You can find third-party plugins with the keyword invoice in the plugins directory: https://wordpress.com/plugins?s=invoice -
Thank you for the response! Unfortunately, I cannot use WooCommerce. We sell online courses. We previously attempted to use WooCommerce and discovered they are incapable of processing purchases of digital products such as this. This is a common issue amongst many sites of business that sell similar products. Long story better intended for another topic thread. Point being – I was hoping to find a plugin that could help people create their own pdf invoices. Where we could set a template, and the client uses dropdowns to select their specific information. I may try out using forms instead, but thought I’d first see if anyone else has experience with this and knows of a specific plugin.
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Hello again @uncoverforensics
Thank you for explaining further. Regarding plugins that would enable customers to generate invoices, I also recommend that you explore options here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/invoice/
While I don’t have a specific plugin to recommend, I am sure you will find something that meets your requirements on this plugin search page. We also have a guide to Find and Choose the Best Plugins.
We previously attempted to use WooCommerce and discovered they are incapable of processing purchases of digital products such as this. This is a common issue amongst many sites of business that sell similar products.
I’d just like to address this misconception. WooCommerce supports selling digital products as one of its core product types. You can read more about this product type and some options for selling digital products using WooCommerce here:
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Thank you for the response and I will check out the plugins related to invoicing.
Regarding WooCommerce & digital products – I understand what you are saying, and I understand that Woo states they support the sale of digital products. Some aspects of Woo DO support the sale of digital products, it’s true. When I was using Woo for my digital products, the front end of the sale would go just fine. However, the back end of the way Woo is structured is they put the transaction into a “pending” status. The reason is because the system does not show the product as being “sent” to the purchaser. Despite the fact that all of the shipping settings were correctly turned off and set to be not applicable since it was a digital product. WooCommerce would see on their end that I was frequently selling products but not “delivering” the goods to the buyer. Therefore my transactions would not go through, my account would get frozen, and then no one could buy anything from me while WooCommerce investigated my business. This cycle happened about once every 3-4 weeks, for 8 straight months. Woo would turn off my ability to accept payments, I would have to call them to find out why, I would have to explain to them that my company sells digital products, and then they would turn my payments back on. After the 6th or 7th time, I went to the internet to see if anyone else had similar issues. Sure enough, there are countless forums for many years now of numerous people having this exact issue. Woo will allow you to set a product as being a digital product, they will even allow you to turn off the need for shipping a product because it is digital….but still the transactions themselves go into “pending” or “processing” and don’t get completed and business’s Woo accounts get paused, etc. Woo may allow you to set up a product as digital, but they won’t actually process the transaction because their system glitches over the fact that the product wasn’t “delivered.”
Since I saw that people had been complaining for years about this, I didn’t bother reaching out to Woo to fix the problem. I just switched to something else. Clearly they are aware of the issue and I hope they remedy it soon.
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