Print Designer: Invoice

An invoice is the document you hand (or email) a researcher that itemizes what a single request cost: the charges, any payments already made, and the amount still due. In Aeon 7 you design that document with the Print Designer — a visual, drag-and-drop layout editor that lives in the browser. There is no Word file to edit and no mail-merge to set up. You arrange text, fields, and tables on a page-sized canvas, save, and Aeon renders the finished PDF whenever staff print an invoice from a request's Billing tab.

The Invoice designer is the same canvas used for every other print template (Request slip, Call slip, User label, and so on). What makes it the invoice designer is the data it can reach: alongside the usual transaction and institution fields, it adds billing totals (Total Charges, Total Payments, Amount Due) and two ready-made line-item tables — a Billing Charges Table and a Payment History Table — that expand to as many rows as the request actually has.

When you'll use this

• You're setting up Aeon for the first time and want the printed invoice to carry your institution's name, address, and logo.
• Your finance office needs the invoice to show specific line items, a tax line, or a remittance address.
• You want a second invoice layout for a particular workflow (for example, a simplified receipt) and need to add it alongside the default.

Day-to-day staff never open this designer — they just click Print on a request and pick a template. You design the template once here; everyone prints from it.

This is a configuration tool

The Print Designer sits inside the Customization Manager. Find it under Designers → Print Designer, then choose Invoice in the left navigation. The browser address is /customizations/print-designer/invoice.

Opening the Invoice designer

1. Open the Customization Manager.
2. In the left navigation, expand Designers and click Print Designer.
3. Under Print Designer, click Invoice.

The designer opens on the invoice template that is currently set as the default. If no invoice templates exist yet, you'll see a No Invoice templates found message with a Create Template button — click it to add your first template (named New Invoice Template) and start with a blank page.

The screen has four parts:

Area	Where	What it's for
Toolbar	Across the top	Pick a template, change page size, save, preview, undo/redo, and the template menu (New, Duplicate, Rename, Set as Default, Import/Export, Delete).
Elements palette	Left edge	The pieces you can drag onto the page: Text, Field, Barcode, Line, Rectangle, Image, plus a Tables group for the billing line-item tables.
Canvas	Center	A to-scale view of the page. Drag elements here, click to select, drag to move or resize.
Properties	Right edge	Settings for whatever element is selected (font, alignment, which field it shows, number format, and so on). The panel slides in when you select something.

Choosing or creating an invoice template

Aeon can hold more than one invoice template — for example, a full itemized invoice and a short receipt. The template selector (the dropdown at the far left of the toolbar) switches between them; the one marked default is the one Aeon offers first when staff print.

To create another invoice template, open the template menu (the ⋯ button next to the selector) and choose one of:

• New Template — start from a blank invoice page.
• Duplicate — copy the current template (handy when the new layout is a small variation of an existing one). The copy is named <name> (Copy).
• Import from Word Document… — upload an existing .doc/.docx invoice and let Aeon convert it into a starting layout (see Bringing in an existing Word invoice below).

Use Rename to give the template a meaningful name, and Set as Default to make it the one staff get by default.

"Default" is per template type

Setting an invoice template as the default only affects invoices. Each template type (Invoice, Call Slip, User, and so on) has its own default, so marking an invoice as default never changes which call slip or user label is default.

Building the invoice layout

You build the page by adding elements from the left palette and positioning them on the canvas.

Adding an element

• Drag an item from the Elements palette onto the canvas, or
• Click the palette item to drop it in the middle of the page, then drag it where you want it.

Newly added elements land selected, so the Properties panel opens immediately for you to configure them.

The palette offers:

Element	Use it for
Text	Static wording that's the same on every invoice — headings, your remittance instructions, a thank-you line.
Field	A value pulled from the request — the invoice number, researcher name, transaction number, a billing total, and so on.
Barcode	A scannable code (Code 39, Code 128, or QR) built from a field value such as the transaction number.
Line / Rectangle	Rules and boxes to separate sections or frame a total.
Image	A logo or letterhead graphic chosen from the image gallery.
Billing Charges Table / Payment History Table	The line-item tables, under the Tables heading. See below.

Inserting an invoice field

A Field element shows a live value. After you drop one onto the canvas, open the Properties panel and choose the field it should display. For an invoice you'll find the values grouped into categories, including:

• Transaction Fields — Transaction Number, Item Title, Item Author, Call Number, and so on.
• Billing Fields — Total Charges, Total Payments, and Amount Due.
• User Fields and Researcher Fields — who the invoice is for.
• Institution Fields and Institution Billing Address — your library's name and remittance address.
• Custom Fields — any transaction custom fields you've defined in the Customization Manager appear here automatically.

For currency and date fields, the Properties panel lets you pick a format (for example, $1,234.00 for currency or a long date like April 4, 2026). Currency and date fields suggest a sensible format the moment you add them.

Adding the line-item tables

Invoices are the template type that gets the two billing tables. They appear in the palette under a Tables heading:

1. Drag Billing Charges Table onto the canvas where the itemized charges should go.
2. The table arrives with default columns — Description, Qty, Unit Fee, and Amount — already formatted (Unit Fee and Amount as currency).
3. Resize it by dragging its handles, and adjust columns in the Properties panel.

Add a Payment History Table the same way to list payments already received (Date, Method, Reference, Amount).

The key thing about these tables is that they grow with the data. You lay out one row's worth of columns; at print time Aeon repeats the row for every charge or payment on the request. A request with five charges prints five rows; a request with one prints one.

Don't forget the totals

The tables show individual line items. Pair them with Field elements for Total Charges, Total Payments, and Amount Due so the bottom of the invoice summarizes the math.

Conditional elements

Any element can be set to appear only when a condition is met — for example, show a "PAID IN FULL" stamp only when Amount Due is zero, or a late-fee notice only when a balance exists. Open an element's Properties and add a condition (such as is empty, equals, or greater than) tied to a field. Elements without conditions always print.

Page setup

The toolbar carries the page-level settings:

• Page size — Letter, Legal, A4, or A5.
• Orientation — Portrait or Landscape.
• Records per page (the grid button) — leave this at 1 per page for a normal one-invoice-per-page document. (This control exists so label-style templates can tile several small records on a sheet; invoices almost always stay at 1.)
• Zoom — 50% to 150%, for your own comfort while editing. It does not affect the printed output.

Margins are part of the page settings and default to half an inch on every side.

Previewing and saving

• Preview (toolbar, right side) renders the current template to a PDF using realistic sample invoice data — a made-up transaction with several charges and a payment — so you can see the finished page, line-item tables and all, without printing a real request.
• Save writes your changes. The toolbar shows Unsaved while you have pending edits and Saved once they're stored; the discard button (the circular arrow, visible only when there are unsaved changes) reverts to the last saved version. Ctrl/Cmd + S also saves.

Save before you leave

Your edits live only in the browser until you click Save. If you switch to a different template or navigate away with unsaved changes, those edits are lost. The Customization Manager warns you when you have unsaved work, but get in the habit of saving as you go.

Editing shortcuts

The canvas supports the editing conveniences you'd expect:

• Undo / Redo — Ctrl/Cmd + Z and Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Z (the toolbar has buttons too).
• Copy / Paste / Duplicate — Ctrl/Cmd + C, Ctrl/Cmd + V, Ctrl/Cmd + D.
• Select all — Ctrl/Cmd + A; deselect — Escape.
• Nudge a selected element with the arrow keys (hold Shift for a larger step).
• Group / Ungroup several elements so they move together — Ctrl/Cmd + G and Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + G.
• Delete the selection with Delete or Backspace.

Bringing in an existing Word invoice

If you already have an Aeon invoice as a Word document, you don't have to rebuild it from scratch. Open the template menu and choose Import from Word Document…, then select the .doc/.docx file. Aeon parses the document, converts its merge fields to Invoice fields where it can, pulls in images, and creates a new invoice template from the result. It then shows an import summary describing what was brought in, converted, or couldn't be matched.

Treat the import as a starting point, not a finished product: review the layout, fix any fields the summary flagged as unmapped, add the Billing Charges/Payment History tables (Word's invoice did its line items differently), preview, and save.

Importing replaces your unsaved work

Importing creates a new template and switches to it. If the template you're currently editing has unsaved changes, Aeon warns you first — those changes will be lost if you continue.

Sharing templates between sites or systems

• Export (template menu) downloads the selected invoice template — layout and any images — as a single .aeon-print-template.zip file.
• Import (template menu) uploads such a file to recreate the template here. Images that already exist (matched by content) are reused rather than duplicated.

This is the way to move a polished invoice design from a test system to production, or to copy it to another Aeon installation.

How the printed invoice gets used

Once you've designed and saved an invoice template, staff print from it without ever seeing the designer: on a request's Billing tab they choose to print or email the invoice and select your template. Aeon fills it with that request's real data — its charges, its payments, its totals — and produces the PDF. Field restrictions still apply at that point, so if a staff member's role hides certain fields, those values are blanked on the printed invoice as well.

Permissions

• Designing invoice templates — creating, editing, renaming, duplicating, deleting, importing, and exporting — requires the Designers configuration permission. Without it, the Print Designer is read-only or unavailable.
• Previewing a template also requires either the Designers permission or View access to Requests (the data an invoice draws on).
• Printing a real invoice from a request is gated on View access to Requests, the same access needed to open the request in the first place.

Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing

A couple of points an SME should confirm:

• Print entry point: this page states staff print invoices from a request's Billing tab and that the print dialog lets them pick a template. Confirm the exact on-screen wording and location of that action, since this designer page only owns the design side — the print-from-request UI is documented separately and I described it from the controller/data flow, not the billing-tab component.
• Screenshots needed: (1) the Invoice designer with toolbar, Elements palette (showing the Tables group), canvas, and Properties panel; (2) a Billing Charges Table selected with its column properties; (3) the Preview PDF of a sample invoice.

The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications, i.e. the detail a tool like Claude would need to regenerate this page — is in the HTML comment directly below this callout. When this page has been reviewed and approved, delete both this callout and that comment; a page with no Editor-review callout is one that's done.