14.26. Send Invoices, Quotes, and Sales Orders in Your Client's Language

If you bill a client in Munich and a client in Lyon from the same tenant, their invoices should not both arrive in English. AlgaPSA renders the printed frame of a customer document — headings, field labels, table column headers, totals rows — in the language that client reads, and formats the dates, numbers, and currency to match.

This covers every document AlgaPSA renders from a layout: invoices, quotes, sales order confirmations, packing slips, and pick lists. It happens on the document itself, so it applies whether the client is emailed a PDF or downloads one from the Client Portal.

Order documents follow the client the order belongs to, which is worth knowing for the two that never leave your building. A packing slip and a pick list for a German client print in German, so if your warehouse staff read English, plan for that before you rely on them on the floor.

The languages are the same seven AlgaPSA is translated into beyond English: French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (Brazil). See 10.4. Set Interface Languages for how language works across the rest of the product.

What gets translated, and what doesn't

A German frame around English line items is the expected result, not a defect. AlgaPSA translates the document's structure. It does not translate the work you described, because that text is yours and a machine translation of it could change what you are billing for.

A translated label is not a compliant invoice. If a client's country requires particular wording, disclosures, or tax presentation, that is still yours to build into the layout. Translation changes the language of the standard labels, not the legal shape of the document.

Which language a document uses

The document follows the recipient, not whoever is looking at it. AlgaPSA checks these in order and stops at the first one that is set:

This is the same order AlgaPSA uses for notification emails, so a client's invoice and the email carrying it arrive in one language rather than two.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Your own language setting does not affect what you send. A billing admin working in English who opens a German client's invoice preview sees the German document, because that is the document the client gets.
• A portal user sees their client's document language. A contact who prefers English, at a client whose default is German, still downloads German invoices — unless that contact is the billing contact, in which case their own preference wins.

Labels and formatting always move together. You will not get German labels with American dates, because a half-translated document reads worse than a consistently English one.

Standard layouts translate, and retyped labels don't

The rule works per label, not per layout.

Standard layouts ship with translatable labels. Clone one, change the logo, colors, spacing, column widths, and which fields appear, and every label you left alone keeps translating. The moment you retype a label's text, that one label becomes fixed text and renders identically in every language. Nothing else in the layout is affected.

To tell the difference while you work, look at the designer canvas: a label that will translate carries a small blue language icon. Hover it and the tooltip reads "Translated automatically into the recipient's language. Edit it to use your own fixed text instead." Edit that text and the icon disappears, which is the label freezing.

That gives you a reliable check that does not depend on remembering how a layout was built:

• Icons present — those labels arrive in each client's language.
• No icons anywhere — the layout's labels are fixed text. Clone a current standard layout and reapply your branding to pick up translated labels.

The practical path to translated documents is to start from a standard layout and customize around the labels: brand it, restructure it, bind the fields you need, and retype label text only where your wording genuinely has to differ.

Preview before a client sees it

Open a layout in Billing > Invoice Layouts or Billing > Quote Layouts and use the Preview language selector in the editor. It lists every supported language and starts on the one you are working in.

Check the layout at the longest language you bill in, not just English. German runs routinely about 30% longer, so a totals column sized comfortably for Subtotal may not fit Zwischensumme, and a column header that fits on one line in English may wrap in French.

The two preview surfaces answer different questions, which is why only one has a selector:

Because both run through the same rendering path, an on-screen preview is trustworthy about what the client actually gets.

Documents you've already sent don't change

An issued PDF is a record of what you sent. Changing a client's language later never rewrites a document they already received.

When a client downloads an invoice or quote from the Client Portal, AlgaPSA serves the copy that was issued to them. Only when no issued copy exists yet does it generate one fresh, in the client's language at that moment. Invoice PDFs become visible to the client when the invoice is sent, not when it is generated.

Related documentation

• 10.4. Set Interface Languages: Personal, Organization, and Client Defaults — the language settings this resolution order reads from
• 14.18. What Are Invoice Layouts — standard vs. custom layouts and how they're assigned
• 14.19. Build an MSP Invoice Layout — the designer workspace where the language icons appear
• 14.10. Quoting — quote layouts and the quote document flow