How to Create an Invoice Using WooCommerce

The one page checkout process in WooCommerce is pretty darn slick. You can beautifully sell all sorts of products. We know because we use it ourselves on WooThemes.com. But there are plenty of special circumstances where you don't want a customer to go through your normal checkout process.

• Sometimes you may want to give special pricing to a customer
• Sometimes you may want to send a direct payment link to your customers / clients
• Sometimes a customer may want to add on something extra to an existing order before you ship it
• And sometimes you may have products which aren't in your public catalog but you want to give them to some customers

In all of these cases you can easily create an invoice and have the customer pay for it using WooCommerce.

Creating the Invoice

Creating an invoice is as simple as creating an order in the backend, adding products, and setting it to pending. I've broken down each step below to show you how it works.

Create a New Order

1. We first need to create a new order. In the WordPress admin click on WooCommerce -> Orders
2. Now click on Add Order 

Add Items

1. Add as many items as you like to the order. If you're adding an extra cost to an existing order I recommend creating a hidden product (ex. Shipping Cost) so it's clear what the user is paying for. Feel free to adjust the price of the items as you see fit.
2. Press the Calculate Total button. 

Sending the Invoice

You now have an order ready to go. You just need to send it.

1. Leave the order status as pending. You must do this otherwise the customer won't be able to pay for it
2. You must enter a billing address email for the customer. If you don't they wont get the invoice.
3. Make sure you've selected a customer
4. Press the Save Order button and you're done!

What the Customer Sees

The customer will be sent an email with a link to pay for the order.

Or you can prompt your user to log into their account and pay for it using the pay link. 

Sending Reminders

In case your customer doesn't pay your invoice you can easily remind them. On the edit order screen you can resend email notifications by selecting Customer Invoice under Order Actions. 

Follow Up

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how to Create The Ultimate Invoicing System using WooCommerce. You can certainly take what you have here and add onto it with the tips in that post.

Happy invoicing!