Get the Invoice Off Your Laptop and Into a Chat
Send an issued invoice to your own Telegram group as a PDF, then forward it to the customer — instead of downloading a file on the laptop you are not sitting at.
Why not just download it?
Because the moment you need to send an invoice is rarely the moment you are at a desk.
A customer asks for their bill while you are standing in the workshop. The invoice already exists in BasilBook, correct and issued — but getting it to them means finding a laptop, downloading a PDF, opening email or Telegram, and attaching it. By the time that is done you have forgotten the other thing you were doing.
Sending it to your own Telegram group collapses that to two taps. The PDF lands in the chat you already have open, and you forward it from there. Nothing about the invoice changes — this is a copy, not a new document.
Before you start
Three things, and you probably have two of them already.
- A Pro workspace — Customer invoicing is a Pro feature, and so is sending. On the free plan the button is not there at all rather than failing when you press it.
- Telegram connected — The chat set under Settings → Notifications — the same one that already receives your alerts. If you have never linked one, send /chatid in the group and paste the ID there.
- An issued invoice — Drafts cannot be sent, because a draft has no legal document yet. Issue it first; the button appears once you have.
Sending one
From the invoice itself — there is no separate screen.
- Open the invoice — Invoices, then click the row. The action buttons sit along the top of the panel that opens.
- Press Telegram — The PDF is drawn on the server and sent to your workspace chat, with the invoice number as its filename.
- Forward it — Long-press the document in Telegram and forward it to your customer, or save it and attach it wherever you prefer.
The document is a Factur-X PDF: an ordinary PDF a customer can open and read, with the structured invoice data embedded inside it for anyone whose accounting software wants to read it automatically. A customer who does not care simply sees the invoice.
What it does not do
It sends to you, not to your customer — and that distinction is the whole feature.
BasilBook holds no address for your customer that it could deliver to. There is no email in the product, and Telegram will not let a bot message someone who has never written to it first. So the last step stays yours, deliberately, rather than being faked.
Sending also changes nothing about the invoice. It is not marked as delivered, its status does not move, and it stays as voidable as it was a minute ago — handing yourself a copy of your own document is not a transmission, and it would be wrong to record one.
When it doesn't send
Three things account for almost every case.
- “Connect Telegram in Settings” — No chat is linked, or notifications are switched off. Both live under Settings → Notifications, and the same chat is used for alerts.
- There is no Telegram button — The invoice is still a draft. The export buttons are hidden until it is issued, because producing an electronic document for an unposted invoice would leave it neither voidable nor creditable.
- “Outside the embedded font” — A customer name or line description contains Khmer script, which the PDF's font does not carry. The invoice is refused by name rather than drawn with blank boxes — print it from the browser instead, which uses your system fonts.