How to Roll Your Own Invoice Website With WordPress to Process Your Own Invoicing Payments

As someone who runs a small business, I need to send invoices quite often. For a few years, I had a solution that worked fine. I used GoDaddy Bookkeeping to keep my business’s books and to send invoices to clients. They had a built-in invoicing feature that processed payments through Stripe.

It was a very simple system, and it worked very well. My clients never had anything bad to say and getting payments quickly through Stripe was nice. Occasionally someone would have to pay with a check, and that was fine as I could manually mark the invoice as paid. But it could only do it in in one currency because it was simple software. So, when I needed to send invoices in GBP, I had to use something else (like Zervant).

Then GoDaddy Bookkeeping basically stopped working.

After GoDaddy acquired Outright, they proceeded to continue to run it, but never improve it or add new features. Then, the one thing I relied on this service for, invoicing – stopped working well. Two things happened when I sent an invoice to clients – they got prompted to log in to GoDaddy, something they never had to do before and why would I assume my client would WANT a GoDaddy account to pay me? Second, something fundamentally broke – there were two instances where a client would pay the invoice twice accidentally and wouldn’t receive a confirmation that they paid at all.

This was very bad. One invoice was for several thousand dollars. Thankfully I was able to reverse the charge right away. But this was enough to make me look for an alternative mostly because I need to occasionally send invoices in other currencies and that didn’t really work with various invoicing alternatives.

In the meantime, I resumed sending invoices through PayPal, which does the trick. But then again, they also have high fees and it isn’t that professional.

What I really wanted, was a simple invoicing service that used Stripe. There are plenty of invoicing services out there, but they all charge a monthly fee, on top of charging fees per transaction. I looked at them all. But I’m trying to cut my business’s costs and adding another monthly bill to just send invoices was a non-starter. I just wanted something simple that made an invoice, sent it to someone and let them pay with their credit card through Stripe.

Eventually, I came to a solution: I made my own payments website.

Years ago this would have been prohibitively expensive. But not so now. There are several WordPress plugins that let you send invoices. I found a couple paid solutions that were pretty cheap – most give the core invoicing feature away and charge for add-ons (like specific payment gateways). After investigating the various plugins, I decided to just build my own payment processing website.

Here’s the process I went through:

  1. Bought a specific domain just for this – Anglotopia.money (anlgotopia.cash just seemed too flashy but I also registered it so no one can spoof it)
  2. Installed WordPress on my Blacklight Solutions Dedicated Server.
  3. Installed an SSL
  4. Installed Sliced Invoices
  5. Set it up
  6. Tested
  7. Purchased 5 Sliced Invoices extensions, totaled $105 and installed them.
  8. Linked to Stripe
  9. Sent several test invoices and did a test payment.
  10. Sent the first invoice to a client (which was promptly paid)

It took an afternoon over the weekend to set up and granted, I already know what I’m doing in this regard. The website is very simple, with a 1-page homepage that says it’s a payment site and you should only be there if you were sent there. I blocked search bots because this site doesn’t need to be indexed in search engines.

Sliced Invoices sets up its own backend and creates secure links for invoices. Only the client can view the invoice. It also gives them an area to login to view their invoices and current statuses. The invoices are basic and nicely designed. They do the job. When you send an invoice to a customer, they get directed to the page on your website to pay. You can have the page be public or use a secure link only they can access. You can track and see if the invoice has been viewed. You can send reminders for payments due.

This is the page the customer sees when they get notified they have an invoice.

I can send invoices in US dollars, British Pounds, and Euros (and also let British customers Pay via bank transfer). It does everything I need an invoicing service to do. And now I don’t have a monthly fee (other than hosting which I was already paying for). I might have to renew these extensions in a year, but we’ll see if it’s necessary.

So far, I’m very pleased. I’ve solved a particular problem that I was having. And it didn’t cost that much. I’ll report back in a few months and see how it’s going in practice.

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