Documents & sharing

Everything about how documents look and how they reach your client: themes, numbering, printing, email, attachments and the client portal.

Designs & colours

Company Settings → Documents controls the printed/emailed look of quotes, orders and invoices:

• Pick one of fifteen designs from the thumbnail grid. Each thumbnail is drawn in your own colours, so you can see what you are choosing before the live preview beside it fills in the detail. They differ in how the letterhead is treated, how the lines table is drawn and how tightly the page is set — not just in colour; the fifteen are listed below.
• Set the design's two colours. The major accent is the load-bearing one — bands, sidebars, stripes, rules and the document title. The minor accent supports it — tinted panels, table heads, striped rows and card bands. Each is picked from a grid of 24 swatches, from the colour picker, or typed as a hex code, and each has its own Reset that puts the design's own colour back. Setting one never changes the other. Whatever you pick, text sitting on a coloured fill is darkened or lightened automatically so it stays readable.
• Set a footer line and payment instructions (shown on invoices and the invoice portal — how to pay you). Quotes, invoices and purchase orders can each carry their own footer underneath; a blank one uses the shared line, so a workspace that only ever set the one sees no change. Credit notes and receipts print the invoice footer.

Your choice applies everywhere at once: the print views, the PDF attached to emails, the email itself, the client portal and receipts. Switching design never changes a document's content or its numbers.

What you preview is what your client receives. Every design is built only from things all three surfaces can render, so the PDF that lands in your client's inbox looks like the preview on screen. That is why the type choices are sans, serif and monospace and nothing more exotic, and why no design has rounded corners — a PDF cannot draw either, and a design that looked one way in the app and another in the attachment would be worse than a plainer one.

The one place a design is not identical is Sidebar in the body of an email: its coloured column carries the letterhead and the dates at the top rather than running the full height, because an email has no page to run down. The PDF attached to that email has the full column as usual.

The fifteen designs

Two related settings sit on their own pages next to it:

• Company Settings → Numbering sets the document numbering per kind: a template over {YYYY} {MM} {DD} date parts plus a counter — {seq} (continuous) or {seqYear}/{seqMonth}/{seqDay} (resetting per period), padded like {seq:6}. Defaults: Q-000001, SO-000001, INV-000001, PO-000001, PMT-000001, PR-000001 (production runs). Every kind also accepts a number you type yourself — quotes, orders, invoices, purchases and payment receipts, on the screen that creates them; leave the box blank for an automatic one. A document can be renamed later too, as long as the new number is not already in use. Typing the number up front is what avoids the gap an automatic number leaves behind when you rename it afterwards: the counter has already moved on, so the number it handed out never appears anywhere.
• Company Settings → Sales defaults holds the Order lead time in days: every new order's promised date starts that far out, rolled off the weekend. Blank leaves it empty.

The document header

Every printed, emailed and shared document opens with your letterhead, pulled from Company Settings → Profile: your logo top-left (scaled to fit 160 × 60), the company name, then the legal name if it differs, your address, a phone · email · website line and your tax ID (e.g. "EIN 12-3456789"). Only the fields you've filled in print. Amounts print in the document's currency (set when it was created, from your base currency) using your workspace locale, and dates in your timezone. The design's header treatment is unchanged with or without a logo, and designs that draw page furniture — the sidebar column, the top stripe, the frame — repeat it on every page of a document that runs long.

Print & email

Every document page has Print views rendered in your theme (orders add a fulfilment sheet and packing list). Email sends the document with a themed PDF attached (logo included).

Nobody is filled in as the recipient. You build the list: everyone on the account — the client's contacts, with their titles, and your workspace's own members — is one click to add, and you can type any other address. Send to as many people as you need.

Every send is recorded on the document's History tab: each address it went to, the subject, whether you included a note, which mail server carried it and who sent it. Creating, rotating and revoking a share link is recorded the same way, so you can always show when a document left the building.

Emails go out through OrderDen as "Your Company via OrderDen" with replies routed to your contact email, or from your own mail server once you've connected and verified one — see Email delivery.

Archiving a document

A quote, order, invoice, credit note or purchase that has been sent, numbered or paid cannot be deleted, and should not be: its number is a promise somebody has in their inbox, the ledger references it, and every report already run off it would quietly change. But four hundred documents from three years ago is not a working list either.

Archive is the answer. An archived document:

• leaves the lists. The Archived filter on every document list shows Hide archived (the default), Archived only, or Show everything.
• keeps its number. Nothing is reused and no sequence has a hole.
• stays in every report and in the ledger. Archiving is a view decision, never an accounting one — your debtors report, revenue figures and stock ledger are unchanged.
• cannot be edited until you restore it, which is one click on the banner the document wears.
• stays at its own URL, so a link from an email last year still opens it.

Delete is for drafts. A draft has none of those attachments, so deleting one costs nothing and keeps a list from filling up with false starts. Anything past draft offers Archive instead, and says so.

Attachments

Clients, quotes, orders and invoices each carry uploaded files — POs, drawings, signed copies — up to 10 MB per file. Choosing a file starts the upload: there is no Upload button to remember, each file shows its own progress bar, and you can pick several at once. Deleting one asks you to confirm first. A quote and the order it became show each other's files, labelled with where they live. Your logo is stored the same way (an image up to 5 MB), attached to the organization.

Share links & the client portal

Every quote, order and invoice can have one active share link — an unguessable URL your client opens without an account:

• A quote can be read and accepted or declined right on the page (the response lands in your activity feed). A quote that asks to be signed shows a signature box instead of a plain Accept button — see Signatures on quotes.
• A quote carrying options is also theirs to fill in: checkboxes for the add-ons you offered, a radio group for each set of alternatives, and a total that moves as they tick. The body of the document is what they are being charged for; the Options available block underneath lists what they have not taken, with prices. Pressing Update my choices recomputes the quote — total, tax and the deposit it asks for — and records what they picked. Accepting or signing freezes the choices: after that the page shows them read-only, and the variant that converts is the one they agreed to.
• An order shows its lines and shipment/tracking progress — tracking numbers link straight to the carrier's tracking page when the carrier has a tracking URL template (Company Settings → Carriers).
• An invoice shows the balance due and your payment instructions — and, once you've connected a payment account, a Pay button that takes card or US bank payments on the spot. See Getting paid online.

Links can expire, count their views, and can be rotated (old URL stops working) or revoked at any time — manage them per document or all together on the Share links page.

A share link is one document to one person who happens to have the URL. When a client should see everything of theirs — and be able to write back to you and send you files — give them a portal account instead: Client portal. The two work together: a client signed in to the portal reaches each document through its own share view, so nothing about printing, signing or paying changes.

Attachments have a visible to client toggle, which is what decides whether a file reaches the portal. Everything is internal until you switch it on.