How to customize Web Invoice e-mail templates

In the latest release of Web Invoice – Invoicing and Billing for WordPress plugin you can customize the e-mails sent to your clients. You can customize the subject as well as the e-mail content. Please bear in mind that Web Invoice only supports plain text e-mails, but you can do wonders with plain text 🙂 .  This can definitely come in handy if you want to localize your invoices or just does not like what comes as default.

Now to get to the point, the e-mail templates are found in ‘Web Invoice’ -> ‘E-mail templates’.  There are three templates,

  • Invoice e-mail – First e-mail your client receives about the invoice
  • Reminder e-mail – E-mail sent when send reminder(s) is selected
  • Receipt e-mail – Sent when the client makes a payment. You also need to set ‘Send Payment Confirmation’ to yes in Settings

All variables are of the format %variable_name. Bellow you will find the list of variables available in the current version.

  • %call_sign – First name + Last name of the client
  • %business_name – Business name as set in the ‘Settings’
  • %recurring – Recurring or not
  • %amount – Amount, with currency symbol and currency formatted
  • %link – Link to the invoice
  • %business_email – Business e-mail as set in the ‘Settings’
  • %subject – Invoice subject
  • %description – Invoice description

You can definitely use the default templates as a guideline for your templates. IMHO, default templaes are awesome 😉

Don’t go away, there is more. You can write your own plugin to add more variables. e.g. you want to use web invoice along with a booking system. In your plugin add a filter for web_invoice_email_variables and add to the global array (variable) $web_invoices_email_variables.

I want to hear what you think about this feature or Web Invoice in general. Please post your ideas and comments in the Web Invoice community forum. Do not forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to get latest news about WordPress plugins and all things web 🙂

Web Invoice exceeds 1000 downloads

Web Invoice – Invoicing and billing for WordPress plugin has exceeded 1000 downloads. It has 1172 dowloads to date. First release of the plugin was made on March 15, 2009 and now in less than 1 month it has more than 1000 downloads.

Web Invoice is ideal for web developers, SEO consultants, general contractors, or anyone with a WordPress blog and clients to bill. If you come under any of the above, you should give Web Invoice a try.

Download or read more about Web Invoice.

How to migrate from WP-Invoice to Web Invoice?

Web Invoice and WP-Invoice are two WordPress plugins that allow sending invoices and bills. Web Invoice is a fork of WP-Invoice with lot of new features that most people will want. In the current release (1.6.2) they are:

  • Send invoice reminders to customers with a secured link back to the
    web invoice
  • Moneybookers, AlertPay or PayPal available if you don’t have a
    credit card processing account
  • Setup recurring billing using Authorize.net’s ARB (Automatic Recurring Billing) feature or Moneybookers
  • Automatically mark invoices paid via Moneybookers as paid (Requires
    merchant status)
  • Automatically mark invoices paid via AlertPay as paid (Requires
    business status)
  • Split gateway support (Your client is given the option of choosing the preferred gateway from the list of gateways you support). e.g PayPal and Moneybookers
  • All user interfaces are internationalized

If you are already using WP-Invoice and would like to leverage these new features, it’s simple. Follow the 3 step process to switch from WP-Invoice to Web Invoice.

  1. Rename the tables invoice_log to web_invoice_log, invoice_main to web_invoice_main, invoice_meta to web_invoice_meta. (Assuming $table_prefix is empty)
  2. Download Web Invoice WordPress plugin and upload it to your server
  3. Activate Web Invoice

That’s all, you can use Web Invoice without losing that you generated with WP-Invoice.