Picture a customer opening the order-complete email and tapping the attached invoice. Your logo at the top. Your brand colour on the table header. The font your shop uses on everything else. Your business name, address, and tax number in a clean letterhead. Products, totals, payment method, all laid out cleanly.
The look is yours, top to bottom. That’s what branded PDFs do: make the invoice in the box (or in the inbox) feel like a piece of your shop, polished to the same level as your emails and your packaging.
The two documents
Invoice. Customer-facing. Line items with optional SKU and attributes, subtotal, discount, shipping (with method shown), tax, total. Payment method and date in the top-right block; your letterhead at the top.
Packing slip. Warehouse-facing. Items and quantities only, no prices, with variation details and SKU if you’ve enabled them. Designed for the person picking the order.
Each is independently togglable. Use a different accounting tool? Turn invoices off, keep the packing slip. Don’t need packing slips? Run the invoice on its own.
Styling, set once
Every PDF reads from your Tracksies Brand Hub:
- Your logo in the letterhead.
- Your primary brand colour on the table header row.
- Your fonts, matched to your Designer choices.
- One
pdf_basefont-size setting scales the document, so long orders don’t spill onto extra pages and short ones don’t look lost.
Zebra-striped rows, no vertical borders, right-aligned totals, dark header, subtitle on the shipping line showing the shipping method. Small details adding up to “looks professional” without you doing any of the detail work yourself.
Where you can grab them
- Order edit screen: one-click download buttons for invoice and packing slip in the order’s PDF meta box.
- WooCommerce admin order list: per-row action icons so you can download without opening the order.
- Packsie packing card: packing-slip button right on the card, alongside the shipping-label link.
Optional: attach the invoice to order emails
Turn on the email-attachment feature; the invoice PDF attaches automatically to WooCommerce’s order-complete email. Customer gets the document in the inbox they already opened.
Optional: let customers download invoices from My Account
Turn on the frontend-download feature; a Download Invoice button appears on every order in My Account. Customers who need the invoice for their records get it without emailing you.
Optional: sequential invoice numbering
If your accounting workflow (or your jurisdiction) wants invoice numbers independent of WooCommerce’s order numbers, turn on sequential numbers. Each invoice gets its own sequential number alongside the WC order number, so the accounting side stays tidy even if order numbers skip or get cancelled.
A note: tax-invoice rules vary by country (whether sequential numbering is required, what the invoice has to show, how long to keep records), and that part isn’t our department. The toolset gives you sequential numbering, your business details, your tax number, line-item breakdowns, and totals — most of what tax authorities ask for on an invoice — but whether you need to enable sequential numbering, and whether the resulting invoice meets your local rules, is a conversation for your accountant.
If you’re weighing this up against WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips
The free plugin by Ewout is the established option in this space. Runs on many thousands of shops, has a mature template designer, has years of refinement behind it.
It’s a standalone plugin with its own settings tree: your letterhead, colours, and templates configured inside its own designer interface. Update your brand colour later and you update it there, separately from the rest of your stack.
HQ’s branded PDFs read directly from Brand Hub: the same settings that drive your admin UI, your transactional emails, and your reviews card styling. Change your logo once in Designer; it flows into the PDF, the emails, the reviews widget, and the admin together.
If you want a dedicated PDF designer with rich per-template options, Ewout’s plugin is the more specialised tool. If you’d rather set your brand in one place and have it flow everywhere, HQ is built around that.
Already running WebToffee PDF Invoices or a commercial alternative?
WebToffee’s plugin offers advanced invoice templates with deep commercial polish: multilingual templates, a rich designer, lots of per-field customisation. If you’re using those features, HQ’s simpler approach may not feel like a step forward. If you adopted WebToffee mainly because free options didn’t have enough styling polish, and you’re not actually using the advanced bits, HQ’s Brand-Hub-driven output gives you the same “looks professional” result without a separate plugin or a separate settings page to maintain.
Why shops keep it on
Branded PDFs help you show up consistently across every customer touchpoint: emails, admin, testimonials, packaging, the invoice in the box. The customer noticing “nice invoice” is a small moment, but it’s one of the handful of small moments that make a shop feel cared-for instead of stock.