Designing & Printing Invoices

Learn how to personalise your invoice design for your business and how to print off invoices for your orders

Clare Cormican avatar
Written by Clare Cormican
Updated over a week ago

When using ChannelGrabber to process your orders, you can choose to print personalised invoices as well as a picking list to provide your locations for each item that is ordered.  This guide will cover setting up both of these features.

 

Personalising Your Invoice

 1.  Please navigate to Settings – Company – PDF Invoice Designer.  Clicking on PDF Invoice Designer will open a new tab with the invoice editor tool.

 

2.  a) If you like, you can start a brand new invoice by typing in a Template Name, then using the Add Elements menu to add the different fields as per your requirements. 

Text
A text field where you can type any text as you wish it to appear on the invoice. Use
 tags for line breaks.

To Address
A pre-made field of all the buyer’s address tags.

From Address
A pre-made field of your address tags (from Settings – Company - Trading Details section).

Image
Adds an image placeholder. You can change the image by double-clicking on it then loading in your own image. 

Invoice Table
A pre-made invoice table where you can customise the headers and table contents (has Sub-Total, Postage, VAT and Total rows pre-loaded). 

Vertical Guide
Adds a visual guideline to help you align fields neatly on your invoice. You can even enter an exact position on the page in mm.  This will be invisible when you print the invoice. 

Horizontal Guide
Adds a visual guideline to help you align fields neatly on your invoice. You can even enter an exact position on the page in mm.  This will be invisible when you print the invoice. 

 

b) Any new element added will automatically be positioned at the top left of the A4 page, so you can just click and drag it to the required position on the page, and use the hangar in the bottom right corner of the element to re-size it.  Clicking on the element will allow you to access a formatting window, so you can change fonts, sizes, alignment etc.

 

c) The invoice uses internal data tags - {{ example }} - to identify sections of the invoice that need to pull data from other parts of the ChannelGrabber system, such as the orders.  For example, {{ trading_company_name }} will automatically pull in your company name from your Trading Details section.  If you add a new text element, the formatting window has a drop-down list of Automated tags, which you can use to add additional detail to your invoice, such as {{order_note}} if you want to display a customer message on your invoice.

A full list of all available data tags and their function can be found in the Knowledgebase guide called “ChannelGrabber HTML Tags (Invoices, Emails, Templates)

 

3.  If you would rather have some help getting started with your invoice, we have some pre-set templates within the system that you can use as a starting point.  When you open the PDF Invoice Designer, find the Load Existing drop-down menu, and select “Default CG Invoice”.  You will see that this provides a fairly standard invoice design, which you can just add your logo to (or remove the image if you don’t have a logo) then it will be ready to use. 

 

a)  To use this as a base, load the Default CG Invoice then at the top of the page click the Duplicate button to copy the pre-made template, then make sure you delete the duplicate name and enter a new Template Name, then click Save:

b)  Double click on the logo placeholder to open the Image Editor, then click on Choose File to upload an image from your PC (please ensure it is a JPG file, as any other format may not display correctly) then click Submit.  The logo you uploaded will show as a preview, then you can click the Use This Image button to apply the image and return to the invoice designer:

 

4.  If you wish to customise the invoice further, you can use the Add Elements options as previously mentioned, and make sure to save any changes, then once you are happy with the invoice design you need to tell ChannelGrabber which accounts to use it for.

a)  Navigate to Settings – Company – Invoice Settings:

b)  First, set the Default Invoice Template option to PDF, then underneath that chose your newly designed invoice as the default.

 

c)  At the lower portion of the page you will see any Trading Companies that you have previously set up.  You can now specify which invoice design should be applied to orders from each trading company:

You can ignore the middle section/leave the fields empty unless you are using the old-style HTML invoices in ChannelGrabber.  Click the Save button at the bottom of the page when you are done.

 

Printing Invoices

Once you have customised your invoice and added locator names and locations to all of your products, you are now ready to start printing Invoices and Picking Lists for your orders.

Navigate to your Orders page, where you can view your orders from your channels as well as any Manual Orders you may have created (a more detailed guide on order processing can be viewed HERE).

 

1.  First, select the orders that you wish to process using the tick boxes on the far left hand column:

 

2.  Next, from the Bulk Actions menu, select Print Invoices (to print in date/time order) and click the Go button:

 

Alternatively, you can choose “Print Invoices By SKU” to print in alphabetical/numerical order by SKU, or “Print Invoices By Title” to print alphabetically by the product title.

 

3.  Once you click Go, a PDF preview of your invoice(s) will open, so you can check your design and the order content before printing, then you can choose to print the invoice(s) and if you have more than one selected, they will all print one after the other.

Alternatively, if you only need to print an invoice for a single order, you can simply click the printer logo from the Actions column, which will launch the PDF Previewer in the same way.

 

4.  Once you have opened the PDF Previewer, the Printer logo in the Actions column will darken to show that the invoice has been printed, and you can hover your mouse pointer over the logo to see exactly when it was printed:

If you have opened the PDF Previewer, but not actually printed the invoice(s), then from the Bulk Actions menu you can select “Mark/Unmark as Printed” then click Go to make the printer icon go back to being faded out, so that you know the invoice has not yet been printed:

 

We hope this guide is helpful, but if you need further assistance, please feel free to contact our Support Team

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