About this plugin
Checkmate PDF Invoices turns every WooCommerce order into a professional PDF document — automatically.
Pick a preset, drag the blocks where you want them, and Checkmate attaches the finished PDF to your order emails. Your customers get their invoice the moment they pay, your warehouse gets a packing slip, and you never touch a template file, a code snippet or a child theme again.
Design your documents visually
The built-in editor is a real drag-and-drop canvas, not a settings page with a “custom CSS” box. Build your layout from rows and columns, then drop in the blocks you need:
- Document blocks — document title, document number, document date, shop info
- Order blocks — billing address, shipping address, order number, order date, payment method, shipping method, customer note
- Tables — line items table and totals table, with control over which columns appear
- Content — logo, headings, text, images, notes, footer
- Layout — rows, columns, spacers, dividers
Every block has its own controls for font size, weight, colour, alignment and spacing, and the live preview shows the real PDF as you build. Set your paper size, orientation and base font per template; DejaVu Sans is the default so accented and non-Latin characters render correctly out of the box.
Start from one of the bundled presets — Classic, Minimal, Compact and Bold invoices, four packing slip styles, plus delivery note and credit note designs — or open a blank canvas.
Four document types
- Invoices — sequential, legally usable numbering, attached to the emails you choose
- Packing Slips — price-free versions for your fulfilment team, with SKU-focused presets
- Delivery Notes — for the parcel or the courier
- Credit Notes — for refunds, with their own numbering format
Automatic email attachments
Assign a template to any WooCommerce email event and Checkmate does the rest: New Order, Processing, Completed, On-Hold, Cancelled, Failed, Refunded, Partially Refunded, Customer Note, and the manual “Customer Invoice” email. Different templates for different events are fine — a full invoice on Completed, a packing slip on New Order for the admin, whatever your workflow needs.
If PDF generation ever fails, the email still goes out. Checkmate never breaks checkout.
Invoice numbering that fits your accounting
- Custom number formats with {year}, {month}, {day} and {number} placeholders
- Zero padding to any width ( 00042 )
- Set the next number manually when migrating from another system
- Optional yearly counter reset
- Separate formats for packing slips and credit notes
- Invoice number column in the orders list
Built for how shops actually work
- Bulk downloads — select orders in the list table and get every invoice in one ZIP
- Order screen buttons — download or print any document straight from the order edit page
- Customer downloads — logged-in customers get a link in My Account; guests get a secure key-based link in their order email, no account required
- HPOS compatible — full support for High-Performance Order Storage, including the new orders screen and its bulk actions
- Performance — optional template caching and on-disk PDF storage, with automatic cleanup of files older than N days
- Debug mode — detailed logging when you need to trace a rendering problem
Developer friendly
- No dependency conflicts. Dompdf ships prefixed inside its own namespace, so Checkmate can never collide with another plugin’s copy of a PDF library.
- Modern PHP. Strict types, namespaced classes, a minimal autoloader, no Composer autoload registered at runtime.
- Filterable. Templates, numbering and limits go through filters — for example checkmate_pdf_invoices_template_limit.