From Quote to Payment to Invoice

Printforge joins up the whole money flow: you send a quote, your customer accepts or pays it online, and Printforge automatically creates the job and the invoice. When card payments are switched on, paying is accepting — one click from your customer moves everything forward. Here's how the pieces fit together.

Send the quote

On the quote detail page, click Send. You'll see a confirmation with an Email me a copy checkbox (on by default) so a copy lands in your own inbox too. The customer gets a tidy email with the quote's details and a PDF attached.

If you've connected Stripe to take card payments, the email leads with a blue Pay [amount] now button, plus a secondary link to view the full quote. If you haven't, it shows a single View and Accept Quote button. Sending moves the quote from Draft to Sent.

What your customer sees

The link opens a clean, branded portal page — no login required — showing the line items, totals, tax, your notes and terms. Any render images or model files you've attached to the quote appear here too, as a gallery and download links. From the portal your customer can:

• Pay [amount] now — pay by card straight away (shown when you take card payments)
• Accept without paying — approve the quote and settle up later
• Decline — turn it down

Paying accepts the quote automatically

When a customer clicks Pay now, Printforge creates the invoice and opens Stripe Checkout — which collects their card, delivery address and email natively. Nothing is marked accepted until the payment actually goes through, so if they change their mind at the checkout screen the quote is left exactly as it was.

Once payment confirms, Printforge does the rest in one go:

• Marks the invoice Paid and records the payment
• Flips the quote to Accepted and creates the Job (queued and ready for production)
• Captures the delivery address and emails the customer a receipt

So a single customer action — paying — accepts the quote, books the job and closes the invoice, with no follow-up from you.

Accepting without paying

If a customer clicks Accept instead of paying, the quote is marked accepted and the job is created the same way. If you take card payments, an invoice is created at the same time and the portal then shows a Pay Now button so they can settle it whenever they like. Accepting first and paying later both end up at the same single invoice — you'll never get a duplicate.

The invoice

Invoices are auto-numbered INV-YYYY-NNN and move through Draft, Sent, Paid, Overdue and Void. When a quote is accepted or paid, the invoice is created for you; you can also create one by hand from a quote, a job, or from scratch. To learn the invoice lifecycle in full, see Creating Invoices from Quotes or Jobs.

Payment can be recorded two ways: automatically, the moment a Stripe card payment clears, or manually, by setting the status to Paid yourself (handy for bank transfers). Either way the PDF regenerates with a "PAID" watermark.

What you need

The pieces sit on different plans:

• Emailing quotes, the customer portal and Stripe card payments are available from the Maker plan up.
• Invoicing starts on the Starter plan (up to 5 invoices a month) and is unlimited on Pro and above. Invoices created automatically from a payment don't count towards the Starter cap.

To take card payments you'll first connect Stripe from Settings. One thing to check: the automatic "paying accepts and marks paid" behaviour relies on Stripe's payment webhook being registered. The pay link itself always works and still charges the card — but if the webhook isn't set up, you'd mark the invoice paid by hand instead of it happening for you.