One shop, two kinds of order
Le Bourlingueur sells illustrated posters of French regions and cities, posters of the wider world, and prints made to order. The storefront is in French. The menu lists posters by region, posters of the world, a personalised poster and a PRO entry, which points to a second audience beside private buyers.
A private customer buys one or two prints. A trade order brings several references, bigger quantities and a buyer who needs a proper trade invoice. The shop has to answer both with the same system.
Consumer and trade rules
French rules change with the buyer. For a consumer, the seller provides an invoice on request. For a business, an invoice is compulsory and carries extra lines: the payment terms, the rate of late-payment penalties, and the fixed 40 euro recovery fee. Posters are charged at the standard 20% VAT rate.
The second set of lines is easy to forget. A template with a free footer note handles it once, and every professional invoice afterwards carries the wording.
Copies matter after the sale as well. French companies keep their accounting documents for ten years, so an invoice has to stay legible and retrievable long after the poster has been framed. A fixed layout with every mandatory line in a set place makes that archive easier to audit.
Quotes before invoices
Le Bourlingueur has used Avada PDF Invoice since 2022. The invoice template is Blue Invoice, written in French, and invoices are emailed automatically. VAT and tax fields are enabled, so the seller's tax details can appear on the page along with a buyer's VAT ID.
The account also holds a Draft Order template for quotes, plus order, packing slip and refund documents, and quote and draft-order documents are switched on in the settings. Draft orders are how a Shopify merchant prepares a bigger order by hand before the customer pays. A quote template gives that step a document of its own.
We rendered the sample on this page as a quote (devis) for a trade order, and only the shop name is real. The buyer, a bookshop, and every address, ID and amount are invented. It lists 26 posters across four lines, with Price and Subtotal both showing the line total. The subtotal is 294 euros, TVA at 20% is 60.40 euros, 8 euros of shipping bring the total to 362.40 euros, and the footer says the quote is valid for 30 days with payment by bank transfer 30 days after invoicing. That footer wording is ours, written for the sample. The penalty and recovery-fee lines described above belong on the invoice that follows.
What 9,600 documents show
The app has sent more than 9,600 documents since 2022. Invoices, orders, packing slips, refunds and quotes all sit on one account, which means a consumer sale and a trade order start from the same set of templates.
Try it on your store
Do you sell to businesses? Write your payment terms and penalty wording into the footer note once, and every professional invoice carries it from then on. Install Avada PDF Invoice and send a test order to see the footer in place.