How do I print the "received date" on an invoice?

Question

I have an urgent problem with invoices. For our finance department, I have to print out all invoices we generated this year. On the invoice, it HAS to display the date the invoice was issued, but instead it displays the date that I print the invoice.

In the template, the line

{ts}Invoice Date:{/ts} {$invoice_date}

gives me the CURRENT date, not the date the invoice was issued.

I have looked for other variables I could use, but I had no luck finding anything.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

Answer 1

EDIT (petednz) - there is a newer solution in 2024 - see other answer

I came accross the same issue. The invoice date gives the current date and that is in most cases not correct.

We have used the receive date of the contribution in the invoice template as follows.

...
{crmAPI var='contribution' entity='Contribution' action='getsingle' id=$id}
...
{ts}Invoice Date:{/ts} {$contribution.receive_date|crmDate:$config->dateformatFull}
...

The top line with {crmApi...} could be present already in the template. So check whether you can find that line. The {crmApi...} line is not defined before the {$contribution....}

Answer 2

The best approach in recent versions of CiviCRM is to replace $invoice_date with

{contribution.receive_date|crmDate:"Full"}