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Print Designer: Invoice Statement

An invoice statement is a single printable page that pulls together a researcher's billing across several requests at once — every charge, every payment made, and what's still owed — rather than billing one request at a time. Think of it as the account summary you hand (or mail) to a frequent researcher: "here is everything you owe us across all your open requests."

The Print Designer is where you decide what that statement looks like — the heading, the researcher's name and address, the table of charges, the grand totals, and any fine print. You lay it out once on a visual canvas; from then on, every statement Aeon prints uses your design with real data dropped in.

Invoice Statement vs. Invoice — they are two different templates

An Invoice (a separate template type) bills one request: one transaction's charges, one balance. An Invoice Statement bills the whole account — it aggregates the charges and payments from multiple requests for one researcher into one document, with the charges ordered by request and a grand total across all of them. If you only ever bill request-by-request, you want the Invoice template. If you send researchers a periodic account summary, you want this one. The designer tool is identical; the underlying data is what differs.

When you'll use this
  • You're setting up billing for a new Aeon site and need a statement layout that matches your institution's letterhead and finance conventions.
  • Researchers receive a consolidated bill covering several requests, and the default statement doesn't show the columns or totals your office needs.
  • You want to add your library's logo, a remittance address, or a "Please pay within 30 days" note to every statement.
  • Your old Aeon used a Word mail-merge statement document and you're rebuilding it in the web client (see Coming from the Word templates below).

Where to find it​

Open the Customization Manager, then in the Designers group expand Print Designer. Each print type is its own entry in that sub-menu — Request, Callslip, User, Invoice, Invoice Statement, and Digitization Request — so click Invoice Statement.

The print type is fixed by the page you land on; there's no type switcher inside the designer. To work on a different print type, return to the sub-menu and pick that entry. The browser tab reads Print Designer: Invoice Statement, and the URL is /customizations/print-designer/invoice-statement.

Permissions

The Print Designer, like every tool in the Designers group, requires the Designers configuration capability on your role. If your role doesn't grant it, the Designers section won't appear in the Customization Manager. Editing print templates changes what everyone prints, so this is an administrator/customizer task.

Generating a Preview is allowed for anyone with the Designers capability, and also for staff who merely have View access to Requests (since statement data is request-based) — but creating, editing, duplicating, or deleting a template always requires the Designers capability.

The designer at a glance​

The screen has three working areas plus a toolbar:

  • Toolbar (top) — pick which Invoice Statement template you're editing (the dropdown lists your saved templates of this type), set page size and orientation, configure the print grid, zoom, undo/redo, group elements, Preview, and Save. A small status word on the right reads Saved, Unsaved, or Saving... so you always know where you stand.
  • Elements palette (left) — the building blocks you drag onto the page: Text, Field, Barcode, Line, Rectangle, and Image. Below those, under a Tables heading, are the two table blocks that matter most for statements: Billing Charges Table and Payment History Table.
  • Canvas (center) — the page itself. Drag elements on, click to select, drag to move, drag the handles to resize.
  • Properties (right) — opens when you select an element, showing everything you can change about it (the field it shows, font, alignment, number/date format, conditions, and so on). Pin it open with the pushpin icon if you want it to stay.

Building or editing a statement template​

1. Pick a template to edit (or start a new one)​

The template dropdown at the top-left lists every Invoice Statement template you have. Pick one to edit it. If none exist yet, the designer offers a Create Template button.

To make a fresh template at any time, open the template menu (the ⋯ button beside the dropdown) and choose New Template. It's created as New InvoiceStatement Template with a placeholder title block reading InvoiceStatement Template; rename both from the same menu with Rename (and by editing the title text on the canvas).

Start from a copy

Rather than build from scratch, select a template that's close to what you want and choose Duplicate from the ⋯ menu. You get a full copy named "… (Copy)" that you can edit freely, leaving the original untouched. This is the safe way to experiment.

2. Set the page up​

In the toolbar, choose the page size (Letter, Legal, A4, or A5) and orientation (Portrait or Landscape). Statements are usually a full Letter/A4 portrait page.

Next to those is the grid control (it reads 1 per page by default). For a statement you almost always leave this at 1 per page — one statement fills the page. The multi-record grid is meant for small repeated items like labels, not full-page statements.

"Records per page" vs. "rows in the statement"

Don't confuse the two. The toolbar's grid / per-page setting controls how many whole statements print on one sheet — leave it at 1. The number of charges on a statement is unlimited and is handled by the Billing Charges Table element, which grows to list however many charges the researcher has. You set up one table; Aeon fills in as many rows as the data requires.

3. Add the heading and researcher details​

Drag a Text element on for the statement title (for example, "Account Statement") and for any static labels. Drag Field elements for the data that changes per researcher. Select a field element and, in Properties, pick the field it shows from the catalog. For a statement the catalog groups fields by category — the ones that describe the researcher and your institution include:

  • User Fields — First Name, Last Name, Username, Email Address, Phone, Organization, Department, and more.
  • Address Fields — Address, Address 2, City, State, Zip Code, Country.
  • Institution Fields and Institution Billing Address — Library Name, Institution Name, and the remittance address/contact fields, all pulled from the Local Info customization table.
  • Statement Totals — the grand totals covered in step 4.
Whose details appear when several requests are involved

A statement spans multiple requests, but those requests belong to the same researcher, so the researcher/address fields come from that researcher's account (specifically, the account on the first request in the batch). You're billing one person for many requests, so there's one name and one address at the top — the per-request detail lives in the charges table below.

4. Add the charges table — the heart of the statement​

From the Tables section of the palette, drag a Billing Charges Table onto the page. This is the line-item list. Unlike a single-request invoice, on a statement this table is populated with charges from every request in the batch, ordered by request and then by date, so the whole account appears in one list.

The table arrives with four preset columns — Description, Qty, Unit Fee, and Amount. Select the table and open Properties to tune those columns: drag a column's width, hide or show it with the eye toggle, and set each one's number format (for example, currency on the Amount column) and alignment.

What the column editor does — and doesn't — let you do

The Properties panel works on the table's existing columns: width, show/hide, format, alignment. It does not offer a field picker to add brand-new columns or rename headers. Behind the scenes each statement row also carries the request it belongs to (transaction number, item title, format, service level) and that request's running totals, but those aren't surfaced as columns in the standard editor — plan your statement layout around the Description / Qty / Unit Fee / Amount columns plus the grand totals below.

To show what the researcher has paid, drag a Payment History Table on as well. It arrives with Date, Method, Reference, and Amount columns and is tuned the same way.

For the grand totals at the bottom, add Field elements bound to the statement-wide totals. In the field picker they live under the Statement Totals category as Total Charges, Total Payments, and Amount Due (the balance owed across all requests). They format as currency.

5. Polish the layout​

  • Add a Line or Rectangle to separate sections or box the totals.
  • Add an Image for your library's logo — click the image element and pick from the shared image gallery.
  • Use conditional logic (in an element's Properties, under conditions) to hide something when a field is empty — for example, only show an "Amount Due" callout when the balance is greater than zero.
  • Multi-select related elements (Shift-click, or Ctrl/Cmd-click) and Group them (⌘G / Ctrl+G) so they move and resize together.

The canvas supports the usual editing shortcuts: arrow keys nudge a selected element (hold Shift for a bigger step), ⌘/Ctrl+C / V copy and paste, ⌘/Ctrl+D duplicates in place, Delete removes, and ⌘/Ctrl+Z / ⌘/Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo.

6. Preview with sample data​

Click Preview in the toolbar. Aeon renders the template to a PDF using realistic sample billing data — a sample researcher, several charges, and a payment — so you can see spacing, fonts, and totals before going live. Preview never touches real records; it's safe to run as often as you like.

Preview is sample data, not a real researcher

The numbers and names in Preview are placeholders generated for the layout. To see a real statement, print one from a researcher's account in daily work once the template is saved and set as default.

7. Save​

Click Save (or press ⌘/Ctrl+S). The status word reads Saving... while it writes, then flips to Saved. If you change your mind before saving, the Discard changes button (the circular-arrow icon, shown only when you have unsaved edits) reverts to the last saved version.

Unsaved changes

The toolbar status word and a leave-the-page guard both warn you about unsaved edits. If you switch to a different template or navigate away with the status reading Unsaved, confirm the prompt only if you mean to lose those edits.

Making a template the one Aeon uses​

Having a template isn't enough — Aeon prints the default Invoice Statement template. To set it, select the template and choose Set as Default from the ⋯ menu. The dropdown marks it with a default badge, and any template previously set as default is cleared automatically (there's one default per type).

Coming from the Word templates​

If you used a previous version of Aeon, statements were Word mail-merge documents (.docx) edited in Microsoft Word with «MERGEFIELD» tags, switches for date formats, and IF/THEN field codes. The web Print Designer replaces all of that — there's no Word, no merge fields, and no local file shares. You build the layout visually and Aeon renders straight to PDF.

To bring an existing design across, open the ⋯ menu and choose Import from Word Document…, then pick your .docx. Aeon parses it, maps the merge fields it recognizes to the field catalog, pulls in images, and creates a new template — then shows a summary of what imported cleanly, what it converted, and anything it couldn't map so you can fix it by hand.

Sharing templates between sites

The Export and Import items in the ⋯ menu move a finished template (and its images) as a single .aeon-print-template.zip package — handy for copying a polished statement from a test site to production, or between institutions.

  • Invoices and Outstanding Balances — where statements get printed in day-to-day work.
  • Print Designer: Invoice — the single-request billing template (set up separately).
Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing

A few points an SME should confirm on this page:

  • Statement workflow framing: I've described an invoice statement as a consolidated, multi-request account summary for one researcher (inferred from the backend, which aggregates charges/payments across several transactions and uses the first transaction's user for the header). Please confirm this matches how your sites actually use the Invoice Statement template, and how staff trigger one in daily work (the exact entry point — user billing tab? bulk print? — isn't covered here yet and may warrant a sentence).
  • Default-template behavior for statements: confirm a statement is printed via the per-type default template (same as other print types) rather than a named customization key.
  • Screenshots needed: (1) the Print Designer on the Invoice Statement type showing the palette Tables section with Billing Charges Table / Payment History Table; (2) the toolbar (template dropdown, grid "1 per page", Preview, Save); (3) a rendered statement Preview PDF.

The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications — 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.