In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to password protect invoices using WooCommerce PDF Invoice Builder

Why safeguard your invoices?

Protecting every piece of sensitive information that you send is becoming a focus in the GDPR regulations and thus is becoming important for every single company. One of the most sensitive pieces of information that every company handles are the invoices. They contain critical information like the customer’s full name and address. So you must always show them only to the right persons.

Generally is ok to send unprotected invoices to your customers, after all the invoices are reaching the right person. But you need to consider human errors:

1.-The user is can submit the wrong email (this happens more often than you think and now is even more common because of the auto-fill/correction programs)

2.-You or anyone on your team can resend the email manually to the wrong address. This is not only REALLY bad but it is also considered a data breach under the GDPR laws

So protecting the information is like purchasing an insurance policy, you generally won’t need it, there are good chances you will never need it, but if bad things happen, you will be glad you have it.

How to password protect/safeguard your invoices?

There are two ways to protect your customer information:

1.- Don’t send the pdf invoice to their email

One solution could be to just don’t send this information by email and let them download it directly to their account. To let the users download their invoices in their account go to template settings

This is a pretty easy approach but using this only has two problems:

1.- Your user needs to have an account: If you let them purchase anonymously they won’t be able to download the invoice

2.- They don’t receive it automatically: They need to know they can download it by logging into their account. Many of them won’t know this, also they will expect their invoice to arrive in their email so they will spam your support portal asking for it.

2.- Send them a password-protected invoice

The good thing is that it is pretty easy to protect your invoices, all you need to do is turn on this feature and that’s it! In the rest of the tutorial, you will learn how.

Prerequisites

To be able to password protect invoices you need to have these tools already installed:

• WooCommerce: This one should be obvious but I mention it just in case. This is a tutorial for safeguarding the invoices that WooCommerce sends so it is important to have it installed.

• WooCommerce PDF Invoice Builder: If your store is not using this plugin to send invoices already you can learn how to set it up in this tutorial: WooCommerce pdf invoices & packing slips | Creation guide

If you have these two prerequisites ready it is pretty easy to password protect the invoice, just follow these steps:

1.- Go to the pdf designer and click on template settings

2.- Click in “Password Protect” and then in “Password protect this pdf”

3.- Define a password, this password can either be a fixed text or you can add smart tags (by clicking on the icon on the right), to include dynamic information in the password like the order number, customer name, or any other type of information.

4.- Define which pdfs will include a password. You can protect all the pdfs that you email or only those that your customer receives.

And that’s it, now your pdfs are going to include a password.

You can also see what is going to be the password of any order to verify that your password will be exactly as you wanted it.

The best solution, why not use both?

For me, the best approach would be to turn these two features on, this way the customers will receive their secure invoice in their email but will also have the option of downloading it directly in their account. This approach has the additional benefit of when the customers asks you for their invoice (maybe the email didn’t reach them) you can just direct them to their account instead of having to resend the invoice yourself.