Document Templates

One page, three tabs

Workspace › Document Templates holds the whole of a document's life.

• Templates — the designs, the builder, which design each document prints with, your brand, and document numbers.
• Documents — the quotations, proforma invoices, purchase orders and statements you make, where the Document Generation plugin is added.
• History — every one of them again, with what happened to it.

The Documents and History tabs appear once the plugin is added. Without it the page is about designs, and nothing is shown that cannot be used.

The template library

Open Workspace › Document Templates. A template is a design for one kind of document. Template library shows each one as a card with a picture of its first page; the tabs along the top — All, Quotation, Proforma Invoice, Tax Invoice and the rest — narrow it to one kind. A company that is not registered for VAT sees them named Invoice, Credit Note and so on, as its documents print.

• Draft — being designed. Nothing prints with it.
• Active v1 — version 1 is what prints. Active v1 · edited means the design has changed since; the changes print only once it is set active again.
• Archived — put away. The Show … archived switch under the cards lists them.
• Prints: names the documents that print with the template now.

Edit opens the builder and Preview shows the PDF. The ⋯ menu holds Use for (for example Use for Tax Invoices), Duplicate, Rename, Archive or Restore, and Delete. A template a document still prints with cannot be archived or deleted — choose another one for that document first.

Nothing on this page changes a figure. Every amount comes from the document itself; a template decides only where it is printed and how it looks.

Three ways to start a template

Press New template, choose the Document and give the template a Name. Then choose how to begin.

Whichever you choose, the result is one ordinary template. It opens in the same builder, every part of it can be moved by hand afterwards, and nothing prints with it until you set it active.

Design in the builder

The builder fills the screen: what can go on the page on the left, the page itself in the middle filled with sample figures, and the settings of whatever is selected on the right. Templates, at the top left, goes back to the library.

• Components — Text, Field group, Picture, Icon, Line and Box go inside an area of the page; Blank area, Text block and Space go between sections.
• Fields — everything this kind of document can print, grouped as Your company, the customer or supplier, Document, Amounts and Page. Only fields the document really has are offered, so nothing is ever typed in braces.
• Sections — ready-made parts such as Header, Line items, Totals, Payment details and Signature, and under On this template the order of everything on the page, with buttons to move, hide or remove each part.
• Assets — Pictures (logos, stamps and signatures) and Stationery, each with Upload.

Drag anything onto the page, or click it to add it to the selected area. Click an item to change it on the right: its position and size, Locked, the size, weight, colour and alignment of its text, a field's Label, what happens when it is Too long, and whether a picture shows the Whole picture or will Fill and crop. Double-click a piece of text to type its words. Ctrl-click (⌘-click on a Mac) or Shift-click to select several items: dragging any one of them moves them all, and Align lines them up. A locked item stays where it is.

With nothing selected, the right-hand side sets up the whole template: Template (its name and description), Paper and its Safe margins, Stationery, Look (typeface, colours, and how dates and numbers are written), Wording (Title and Watermark) and Editing.

Title is what the document calls itself. Left blank it prints the proper name of the type — Tax Invoice, Receipt, Purchase Order, Proforma Invoice. If your company is registered for VAT, keep the words the FTA expects. If it is not registered, a blank title already prints Invoice (and Credit Note), the VAT figures and incl. VAT labels are left out, and the checks before Set active do not ask for a TRN or VAT. A title typed as exactly Tax Invoice prints Invoice for you all the same; a title of your own that still says “tax” is warned about, with Use “Invoice” to clear it. A proforma's title must keep the word Proforma. Whether your company is registered is set in Workspace › Settings.

• Undo and Redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y) step back through every change. The draft saves itself as you work, and Draft saved under the template's name confirms it.
• Preview shows the PDF exactly as it prints, and how many pages it came to.
• Save keeps the design as a numbered version to come back to. Save as copies it into a new template, for the same or a related document.
• Matching designs your other documents to look like this one — tick a Receipt, a Purchase Order, a Statement of Account or a Quotation and it makes a template for each, carrying your letterhead, colours, paper, footer and standing text across. Tick Use them straight away to make each one active and print with it at once; leave it off and they wait as drafts for you to look at first.
• Versions (the clock) lists every version. Load into draft takes an earlier one back into the draft; Print with this version makes an earlier one print again.

A table that keeps its depth

A table normally grows to its rows and stops, so an invoice with one line prints as a narrow strip with the totals floating under it. Keep depth, in a table's settings, makes the ruled box reach a set distance down the page whatever it holds — the empty ruled space below the lines is what says the list is finished.

• Set it in millimetres. 0 is the ordinary behaviour: as tall as its rows.
• It is a floor, never a ceiling. A table with more in it than the depth you asked for is left exactly as it is.
• It is ignored once a table runs onto a second page, because forcing a height onto a table that is splitting would push a row past the paper.
• Pair it with Borders: Grid in the table's Look for the ruled box seen on printed invoices.

Printing your bank details

The Fields panel has a Your bank account group — Account name, Bank name, Account number, IBAN, SWIFT / BIC and Account currency. They are read from Banking, so correcting an IBAN there corrects every document that prints it, and nothing has to be retyped on each template.

Which account they print is set per template, under Payment details with nothing selected. If you keep one bank account it is used without being chosen. If you keep several, choose one — the fields print nothing until you do, and the template refuses to be made active, because a customer paying into the wrong account is not a mistake worth guessing at.

• An invoice and a statement can name different accounts. Each template holds its own choice.
• Your invoice's account also says how to pay on Transportation's booking confirmations and quotations: where a deposit is asked, they say How to pay, into the account and with the details your invoice prints. The starter designs show no bank fields, so until Your bank account fields are added to your invoice's design (and, with several accounts, one is chosen), nothing is said of how to pay.
• Only real bank accounts are offered. Cash in a drawer has no IBAN, and a card gateway's clearing account is money on its way to a bank rather than somewhere a customer can send any.
• A Purchase Order is not offered these fields. The only bank account relevant on one is the supplier's, not yours.

Tables on a receipt

A receipt's Applied to table lists the invoices the money settled. Selecting it offers its columns — Invoice, Date, Invoice total, Already paid, Applied and Balance — each of which can be hidden, renamed, widened or moved.

Money received against no invoice at all — a fee, a deposit, a student's term payment — settles nothing, so the table has no rows and is left out, and the amount appears only in the Amount received box. Tick Show a direct payment as a row on that table to give the payment a row of its own instead, named after its reference or its note. The Invoice, Invoice total, Already paid and Balance cells stay empty, because there is no invoice to fill them.

A split receipt — one amount received for several things — prints a Received for table: each line's description, its VAT and its amount. The starter receipt designs carry it, and it takes no room on any other receipt. A design saved before it existed still prints it on a split receipt, after Applied to (or after the Amount received box); place the table yourself to put it somewhere else. Where the lines carry VAT, the built-in letterhead also prints the Subtotal and VAT rows, so the lines add up to the amount received.

One design, every document

A company needs a receipt, a purchase order and a statement that look like its invoice. Matching does that in one step rather than four: it makes a template for each document you tick, already carrying the design of the one you have open.

• What carries — your logo and the whole top of the page, the footer, your notes, your payment details, your terms, your signature block, the colours, the typeface, the paper size, the margins and your stationery.
• What is rebuilt — the body, because the documents are not the same. A receipt has no line items and a statement has no item table, so each one is given its own, and the result tells you in plain words what it had to rebuild.
• What is never carried — the title. A receipt made from an invoice names itself Receipt, whatever the invoice calls itself.

A Quotation, a Tax Credit Note and a Simplified Tax Invoice hold the same content as a tax invoice, so those carry across exactly and nothing is rebuilt — the list marks them carries across exactly.

Shapes, icons and cropping pictures

Three ways to draw on the page, all of which print as vectors, so they stay sharp at any size and on any printer.

• Box has a Shape: Rectangle, Ellipse, Diamond, Triangle or Chevron, with a fill, an outline and — on a rectangle — a corner radius. A diamond suits a seal or a stamp area; a chevron suits a step or the end of a banner.
• Icon places one of twenty-two built-in marks: Telephone, Mobile, Email, Website, Address, Time, Date, Tick, Tick in a circle, Star, Document, Bank, Card, Delivery, Package, Person, Company, Price tag, Guarantee, Information, Note and Signature. Choose its colour, its line weight, and whether it is Solid. An icon is drawn square inside its box and centred, so it never stretches out of shape.
• Picture has a Mask — Whole rectangle, Circle or Rounded corners — and a Crop that trims a percentage off each edge before the picture is placed. Use the crop for a screenshot with a browser bar across the top, or a photograph with dead space around its subject; a masked picture fills its shape rather than sitting inside it.

A design that cannot break

• Items snap to the grid and to the edges and centres of their neighbours. Hold Alt while dragging to place one freely; Editing sets the grid.
• Nothing can be moved outside the page's safe margins, and a new item dropped onto another moves to the nearest free space. Locked keeps an item where it is.
• An area with Grow with long text gets taller when a long name or address wraps, pushing everything below it down instead of printing over it.
• A table always fits its width. When the columns ticked do not fit, the least important are left out and the builder names them; figures print smaller rather than lose a digit, and long descriptions wrap. The columns a document cannot do without — on an item table, Description and Amount — cannot be switched off.
• Tables carry on over new pages by themselves and can Repeat the header row on every page. The totals follow the table and never overlap it.
• An area's Placement can make it a Page header (repeats) or a Page footer (repeats), on Every page, The first page or Page 2 onwards — your name and the document number at the top of every later page, for example. The Page X of Y field numbers the pages.
• A picture is never stretched out of shape. Match the picture’s proportions sizes its box to the picture.

Check it, then set it active

Choose a Sample at the top of the builder to fill the page with awkward figures: Long customer name, Long address, Long descriptions, Large amounts, Many lines, Multi-page, Large statement (statements only) or Minimal data.

The professional templates

Fourteen finished designs come with Accmerio, and each one works for every kind of document, so a company that chooses Clean Finance can have a quotation, an invoice, a receipt and a statement that plainly belong together.

Choosing one applies your own brand colours and typeface over it, if you have set them under Brand. From there it is an ordinary template: move anything, change anything.

Let the designer build it

Generate with AI designs the whole template — the page, the palette, the header, where everything sits, the table, the totals and the footer — from your brand and a sentence or two about what you want. It needs the Document Generation plugin.

• It cannot make a broken template. A design that named a field the document does not have, or forgot something a tax invoice must show, is repaired before you see it, and the repairs are listed in plain English.
• It checks its own work. Each design is printed with ordinary figures and with the awkward ones — a forty-line invoice, names long enough to wrap, a two-hundred-row statement — and looked at again. Improve design acts on what it found.
• Nothing is lost. Your description, your files, the designs and the conversation are saved as you go, so closing the page or coming back tomorrow costs nothing.
• Locked parts stay put. Anything you lock under Settings — your header, the bank details, the tax fields — is left exactly as it is when the designer changes the rest.

Your brand, written once

Brand holds what every design should use: your primary and secondary logo, your signature and stamp, your five brand colours, your typeface, and the standing words you print — your footer, your terms, your bank details and your signature line.

Set it once and every design, whether you choose it, draw it or ask for it, starts from it. If you upload a logo, the designer looks at it once and keeps what it learned, so the same file is not examined again every time you design something. It will also tell you when a file is not good enough to print — a logo too small to print sharply is better known before a design is built on it than after.

One template, five tabs

A template open in the builder has five tabs.

Documents and their history live here, with the design that made them, rather than in a separate place. What a design has produced is a fact about that design.

Versions, and documents that do not change

Every version you save is kept, and every document printed records the version that printed it.

• Save keeps the draft as a numbered version. Nothing prints differently until you press Set active.
• Versions lists them with the number of documents each one printed, so a version that is really in use is obvious.
• Load into draft brings an earlier version back to work on; Print with this version makes an earlier one print again.

Which template for which document

Under Which template for which document, choose the template each kind of document prints with. A change applies to everything printed from then on, including an older document printed again.

• Offered first are the templates Designed for that document, then Related designs — an active template for a related document that has everything this one needs, such as a tax invoice design used for credit notes — then Earlier letterheads.
• A template that cannot print the document, such as a draft, is listed with the reason and cannot be chosen.
• Until you choose, a document prints with an active template made for it, or else your first letterhead.
• Quotations, purchase orders and statements made in Documents print with the template chosen here, unless another is chosen on the document itself with Design.

Earlier letterheads

Letterheads designed before the builder are listed under Earlier letterheads and keep printing exactly as before for every document that uses them. Edit settings opens their familiar settings — Style and paper with the logo, What to print, Line columns and Wording — beside a live PDF preview.

Document numbers

A series that uses {METHOD} can also count once for each method: choose A counter for each payment method under Counting, and card receipts and cash receipts each run 1, 2, 3…. Each counter is then listed under Next number, for each payment method and each moves forward on its own.