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As a follow-up to this guide on invoicing clients, Kate Loving Shenk wants to know how to invoice with PayPal. This guide will walk you through the “Create New Invoice” screen found in the “Request Money” section of your PayPal account.

Before You Start

Before you can invoice a client using PayPal, you will need to ensure that you have at least a Premier account. This is because, in order to take advantage of PayPal’s invoicing feature, you will need access to its suite of merchant services. You have limited access to these services with a personal account, and full access with either the premier or Business account types. It doesn’t cost anything to upgrade from a Personal to Premier account, but some extra documentation is required. When you wish to upgrade, PayPal will walk you through that process step by step, and let you know what kinds of documentation you will need.

Creating your First Invoice

Once you’ve either upgraded your account, or ensured that you have at least a Premier account, you can begin sending invoices. To start creating your invoice, go to the “Request Money” section of your PayPal account. Once you click on that section, a “manage Invoices” screen will appear. On this screen, click “Create New Invoice.”

Selecting A Template

The first thing you need to do when creating your invoice is select a template. PayPal provides a default template to start with, and you have the ability to create new templates from any invoice you create. When selecting or creating your template, you have the option to add your logo. You can ensure that your logo is added to every invoice by visiting the “Invoice Settings” section. You can also set your business information here so that you have the option of not entering that information for every invoice.

Entering the information

Hopefully, you’ve already set up your business information. Next, you need to either add or select a client to send the invoice to. You can either add the client’s information manually, or select from your address book. Note that this address book is not the same one that comes with your email client. The address book you’ll be using is stored with PayPal. if you’re manually adding client information, you have the option to save that information to the address book so that you can use it lager.

Filling Out The Details

Fortunately, payPal’s invoice creation tools maps well to the previous guide on invoicing. All you need to do is fill in the information, and then, once you’re done and you’ve checked to make sure everything is correct, send the invoice. Your client will receive a copy, you will receive a copy, and PayPal will keep track of invoices and their status on the “Manage invoices” screen. Once your client pays the invoice, PayPal will automatically change its status to paid.

Conclusion

All of the WordPress solutions I linked to in the earlier guide support using PayPal as a payment gateway out of the box. So you can either use this guide and manually create your invoices directly through PayPal, or you can use one of the WordPress solutions to create your invoices and then accept payment with PayPal. Either method works, and the choice is yours.


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