How can I send a Paypal Invoice?

No third party services are needed to solve this particular problem I am glad to report! In fact, Paypal has a complete invoicing system built into the system (though it can't do recurring invoices, that's something you'll need to do with a subscription, the subject of a different blog post).

I needed to send a money request to a client myself, so I took advantage of your request to track exactly what steps were involved in creating my own invoice. A fair number of the specific fields are blurred for privacy, but I think you'll be able to get a sense of the process (it's easy!) from this posting...

To start out, log in to your Paypal account, then under the "Request Money" tab choose "Create Invoice".

You'll see this:

Since we're going to create an invoice from scratch, choose "New Invoice" and click on "Continue" to get to the first interesting step of the process.

Now you'll need to choose your address and phone number from the options shown, then either select the recipients email address from the pop-up menu or type it in (I suggest copy and paste from an email addr to ensure you get it right).

Scroll down a bit, there's more to fill in here...

If you're invoicing them for a physical product, choose "Goods", but if it's a service, as the help I gave the company I'm invoicing, choose "Services", then fill in the rest as appropriate.

Scroll down further, the best is yet to come: the $$ amount $$ you want to bill them:

As you can see here, the ability to create quite fancy line-item invoices is a feature of Paypal Invoices, along with shipping and tax calculations. Very helpful if you're a merchant or need to collect tax, etc, but you're on your own in term of figuring out what percentage of tax you need to collect and how to report and remit it to the local revenue department or agency.

Finally, if it all looks good, click on "Continue" to see a summary of your newly created invoice:

Looks good (well, hopefully yours isn't as blurry! :-) so click on "Send Invoice" and it's sent. Now, save it as an invoice and next time it'll be one click to send it to the client:

That's the basics of how to work with Paypal Invoices. Hope that helps you get the money from your clients in a more professional manner.

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