SoftGlaze PDF Invoices for WooCommerce

SoftGlaze PDF Invoices turns WooCommerce orders — and invoices you create by hand — into clean, professional PDF documents. Everything renders 100% locally: the bundled dompdf engine runs on your own server, every logo, icon and font is embedded from local files, and a document render never makes an outbound HTTP request. The default install talks to zero external services; the only features that can ever reach the network are opt-in and off by default (the EU VIES VAT lookup and cloud backup — each to an official service or your own account).

It scales with you: from “I just need an invoice attached to my order emails” all the way to a full self-service invoice-builder website your visitors sign up and use — all from one plugin, driven by a modern React admin.

Four document types, one design system

• Invoices, packing slips, proforma invoices and credit notes — one template engine, four faces. Each document type uses a stock design or a custom template you build, at the paper size you choose (A4 / Letter).
• Credit notes on refund — refund an order and a credit note is offered automatically, referencing the original invoice.
• Receipts — an optional “Receipt vs Invoice” choice at checkout, with its own template and (optionally) its own number sequence.
• Delivery notes — print carrier, tracking number, shipping and expected-delivery dates on the invoice and/or packing slip (opt-in, per type).

Numbering that fits your books

• Sequential auto-numbering with prefix/suffix, {YYYY} / {MM} placeholders, zero-padding and yearly reset — or simply reuse the WooCommerce order number or the raw order ID.
• Separate, race-safe sequences for credit notes and proforma invoices, each with its own start / prefix / suffix / padding.
• Migrating from another plugin? Detect existing YITH / WebToffee numbers and continue your sequence from the highest, so numbering stays unbroken.

Automation

• Auto-generate documents on the order statuses you choose.
• A configurable document × WooCommerce-email matrix — attach the right document to the right transactional email (e.g. the invoice on “Completed”, the packing slip on “Processing”).
• Fulfillment stages — a safe parallel flow (In packaging → Dispatched → In transit → Delivered) that never touches WooCommerce’s own order statuses, with live dashboard counters, optional per-stage customer emails, and the current stage printed on packing slips.
• Payment reminders — automatically email customers past their due date at the day-offsets you set; reminders stop the moment an order is paid.
• Accountant export — on a chosen day each month, email your accountant a ZIP of last month’s invoice PDFs plus a CSV index. A global kill-switch pauses every automated email at once.

A real admin, not just a settings page

• A Profit & Loss dashboard — Revenue, Item costs, Gross profit, Margin %, Tax collected, Refunds and Unpaid outstanding, with a month / quarter / year / custom switcher, inline charts, a monthly breakdown and top products, all exportable to CSV. (Honestly labelled “gross profit = revenue − item costs” — sales-and-margin at a glance, not double-entry accounting.)
• A searchable, filterable Documents manager with bulk actions — generate, email, or download a ZIP — across both WooCommerce and manual documents, with source / type / status / stage / date filters.
• A Products table mirroring your WooCommerce catalogue (thumbnail, SKU, price, cost, stock) with a Cost price field that feeds the margin maths, plus branded product-catalog PDFs.
• On the WooCommerce order screen: generate / view / email documents, set the fulfillment stage, and record carrier & tracking — on both the classic and HPOS order screens. There’s also an Invoice column and bulk actions on the orders list, and a “Download invoice” button in My Account.
• A built-in System Check page (and WordPress Site Health tests) that verifies PHP, extensions, storage and the engine, and renders a live sample PDF so you can confirm it works before you rely on it.
• A guided first-run setup wizard for company details, currency and numbering (with a live invoice-number preview).

Design your documents visually

• A drag-and-drop template builder: reorder sections (header, bill-to, meta, items, totals, payment, terms, signature, plus text / divider / spacer and a sanitised custom-HTML block), toggle what each shows, and choose which item columns print.
• Design tokens — colours, a bundled dompdf-safe font, base size, heading case, corner radius, header / totals style, logo position and your uploaded logo.
• A side-by-side live preview renders through the real engine as you edit, plus an “Exact PDF” button — what you preview is exactly what generates. Start from any of 10 stock designs, and export / import templates as JSON between sites.

Works with or without WooCommerce

• Manual invoices — a full “New invoice” screen: saved clients (de-duplicated by email), unlimited line items (quantity, unit price, cost, tax rate), currency, date, template and status. A race-safe number is assigned, the PDF is stored, and a share link is ready — even with WooCommerce switched off.
• A public invoice-builder website — four shortcodes ([sgci_invoice_builder], [sgci_my_invoices], [sgci_dashboard], [sgci_login] / [sgci_register]) let visitors sign up, build their own invoices with a live preview, and manage them — a complete self-service invoice site. Every document is private to its owner; one user can never see another’s. When WooCommerce is active, the same view merges into a My Account → Invoices tab.

Share & send

• Public share links — a tokenised, no-login viewer page with single-PDF download, per-document expiry (7 / 30 / 90 days or never), regenerate and revoke, and an optional QR code printed on the PDF.
• Send any document by email from the order screen or the Documents manager, with an editable recipient / subject / message, dynamic {tags} filled in on send, and a logged send history.

Compliance & exports

• VAT / fiscal-code at checkout (classic and block checkout) — each field independently optional or required, scoped to all countries / EU only / a country list, with per-country VAT format checks, the Italian Partita IVA & Codice Fiscale checksums, and an optional EU VIES online lookup (off by default).
• Italian e-invoicing (FatturaPA) — generate the official FatturaPA 1.2 (FPR12) XML for invoices and credit notes, per-document or as a bulk ZIP, validated locally against the Agenzia delle Entrate schema before download. Honest scope: it produces the XML file — it does not transmit to the SDI, and it refuses to guess when data can’t be mapped cleanly.
• Accounting exports — the Documents list exports to CSV or XML (respecting your active filters), and each document to a UBL-lite XML. Product lists export to CSV / XML too.

Cloud backup (optional, off by default)

• Copy every generated document to your own Dropbox or Google Drive, mirroring the local folder layout (/SoftGlaze Invoices/{Year}/{Month}/).
• You use your own app credentials via a standard OAuth flow — there is no SoftGlaze server in the middle. Refresh tokens are stored encrypted at rest on your server.
• Background uploads with automatic retry, a “Backup everything now” backfill, and a disconnect that revokes and deletes the stored tokens. Nothing is uploaded — and no backup task is even scheduled — until you connect an account.

Privacy, security & compatibility

• Zero external requests by default. The PDF engine always renders locally; the only opt-in network features are the EU VIES check and cloud backup, each disclosed here and in a settings notice.
• HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) compatible; all order data is read through WooCommerce CRUD.
• Generated files live in a protected uploads directory (deny-all + index guard) and are served only through capability- and ownership-checked endpoints — a direct link to someone else’s document returns “not found”.
• Every feature added since your current version is off by default and update-safe: an existing store’s checkout, documents, emails and numbering are unchanged until you opt in.
• Developer-friendly — human-readable React source ships in src/; the filters sgci_document_template_json and sgci_document_html let you reshape output in code; and a shared dynamic-tag engine powers {invoice_number}, {order_number}, {total}, {share_url}, {carrier}, {tracking_code}, {order_meta:key}, {user_meta:key} and more.

Bundled libraries (all GPL-compatible, in vendor/): dompdf (LGPL-2.1) with php-font-lib and php-svg-lib, with docs and tests removed.