Creating payment receipts using Python

Creating payment receipts is a pretty common task, be it an e-commerce website or any local store for that matter.

Here, we will see how to create our own transaction receipts just by using python. We would be using reportlab to generate the PDFs. Generally, it comes as a built-in package but sometimes it might not be present too. If it’s not present, then simply type the following in your terminal

Installation:

pip install reportlab

Approach:

• Import module.
• We need the data in the form of a list of lists. The 0th index of the outer index is the headers.
• We create a simple doc template with the specified paper size (here A4)
• Then get a sample style sheet from the built-in style sheets and add the styling accordingly.
• After you have created a style object, feed in the data and the style sheet to the pdf object and build it.

Below is the implementation:

Python3

# imports module
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Table, Paragraph, TableStyle
from reportlab.lib import colors
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import A4
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet

# data which we are going to display as tables
DATA = [
    [ "Date" , "Name", "Subscription", "Price (Rs.)" ],
    [
        "16/11/2020",
        "Full Stack Development with React & Node JS - Live",
        "Lifetime",
        "10,999.00/-",
    ],
    [ "16/11/2020", "Geeks Classes: Live Session", "6 months", "9,999.00/-"],
    [ "Sub Total", "", "", "20,9998.00/-"],
    [ "Discount", "", "", "-3,000.00/-"],
    [ "Total", "", "", "17,998.00/-"],
]

# creating a Base Document Template of page size A4
pdf = SimpleDocTemplate( "receipt.pdf" , pagesize = A4 )

# standard stylesheet defined within reportlab itself
styles = getSampleStyleSheet()

# fetching the style of Top level heading (Heading1)
title_style = styles[ "Heading1" ]

# 0: left, 1: center, 2: right
title_style.alignment = 1

# creating the paragraph with
# the heading text and passing the styles of it
title = Paragraph( "GeeksforGeeks" , title_style )

# creates a Table Style object and in it,
# defines the styles row wise
# the tuples which look like coordinates
# are nothing but rows and columns
style = TableStyle(
    [
        ( "BOX" , ( 0, 0 ), ( -1, -1 ), 1 , colors.black ),
        ( "GRID" , ( 0, 0 ), ( 4 , 4 ), 1 , colors.black ),
        ( "BACKGROUND" , ( 0, 0 ), ( 3, 0 ), colors.gray ),
        ( "TEXTCOLOR" , ( 0, 0 ), ( -1, 0 ), colors.whitesmoke ),
        ( "ALIGN" , ( 0, 0 ), ( -1, -1 ), "CENTER" ),
        ( "BACKGROUND" , ( 0 , 1 ) , ( -1 , -1 ), colors.beige ),
    ]
)

# creates a table object and passes the style to it
table = Table( DATA , style = style )

# final step which builds the
# actual pdf putting together all the elements
pdf.build([ title , table ])

Output:

receipt.pdf