DTM

Because there's a bug in the software which I'd want to see fixed first. It appears to store hours and minutes as a number of hours, so 5 minutes is entered as 00:05. However in the reporting this shows as 4 minutes, because of - I'm just guessing - the rounding error that occurs when you save 5 minutes as 0.08 hours instead of 0 hours and 5 minutes, and then truncate the fractional part when converting it back to hours and minutes. I would be more bothered about this except for the fact it works in the client's favour so I've ignored it. Otherwise, it's not misdescribed, it does what it says it does, it's just that I didn't read the description closely enough. It works for one or more particular use-cases but not ours. - Thanks for the suggestion - I will check it out. We previously used a combination of Kayako and Excel with a macro so I'm hoping for something integrated 🙂

Hi I was looking to see if anyone has a recommendation for an add-on module to track time used by clients. Our scenario is that we have: A. "Contract" clients. They buy a fixed block of time monthly which renews each month. Unused time does not roll over. On payment of the monthly invoice, the number of hours the client has available resets to the monthly allowance. B. "Pay as You Go" clients. They buy blocks of time when they want. Time purchased never expires. On payment of an invoice for a time block the additional hours are added to the balance on the account. In both cases: time used is debited in minimum 20 minute blocks. We need the system to be able to do the following at a minimum: 1. Set the "opening balance" of time available for each client, probably as a field in the user's profile; 2. Identify the "products" which is to say the time block products and monthly contract products and assign the time that item represents to that product e.g. 5 Hour PAYG Time Block = 5 hours, 20 Hour Contract Time = 20 hours. 3. Show the amount of time remaining on each account both to us and to the client in real time in their client area. This is a simple number string e.g. 3 hours 20 minutes; 4. Enable the input of time used for each ticket and deduct that from the customer's account; this can be multiple entries on various days on the same ticket - the status of the ticket is irrelevant and time is deducted from the account as it is used; 5. Produce a report on request, for each client, which shows - based on the input time range but by default the current month - a list of tickets, with the ticket ID, ticket "name" / description, date and time and time used. Ideally this would be both an admin function, and also a user function from the client area. and ideally: 1. Notify us and/or the client when time is running low, particularly for Pay as You Go accounts (B above) 2. Prevent the client from opening a ticket if they have no time remaining. Or, allow it to be opened, but warn the admin user on viewing a ticket on such an account - I purchased something called "Time and Task Manager" which caters for some of these requirements but not all, and is not usable for this scenario. It caters for a specific and different scenario so we can't use it. I need to uninstall and replace it. Can anyone say: what's the closest fit for the requirements above? Thanks.

We're a consultancy. We log work requests into this system and we have a custom field for tickets called "Time Estimate". We put the number of hours we expect a particular thing to take into this field. The customer can see it on the page for that ticket in their client area. Is there any way to pull a report from the system for one client which lists all their tickets (this is possible) and also pulls in that custom field (this doesn't seem to be possible)? Thus, we can send a client a list of all of their outstanding requests which also has the estimated time on each row, so that they may prioritise the items they want done? Thanks.

Aha - that's sorted it. Many thanks!

Hi, Quick question about custom fields: We're a development and consulting company. "Tickets" don't necessarily represent issues to be solved. They may indicate work items or projects. We use a custom field to enter the estimated time for each ticket. This serves two purposes: 1. We can compare our estimates to actuals; 2. Clients with a big list of requests can see the amount of time that will be required to do each one and thus move their priorities about - for example to get some small pieces done ahead of a larger one. In order to do that the client needs to be able to know the estimated time. Is there any way to show the custom field on the client's ticket view page? Thanks, Mark

.docx is in the list of allowed file attachment types and they're still being removed. Sometimes.. Here is that list, with carriage returns added after the commas in this post for clarity (the actual list as it appears in the system is in the first post without them): .jpg, .gif, .jpeg, .png, .txt, .pdf, .zip, .xls, .xlsx, .htm, .odf, .doc, .docx, .rar, .psd, .ppt, .pptx There aren't any rogue spaces in the field. I am wondering if this is a bug or if I am missing something obvious (probably). If I send an email to the system from my email account - there's a matching account in WHMCS to receive it - it doesn't strip these. If one of my clients sends the identical attachment - the same file - it does. I watched it do exactly this yesterday. If I look on the Emails tab of the Client info area, I can see the inbound email minus the attachment, yet it was included in that email. The problem seems to be either sporadic, or it is client-specific. It affects this particular client every time. There wasn't, for example, a space after the file extension in the attached file. It's a mystery but it's an annoying one, as I have to keep going back to the client and asking her to send it again. Does this have anything to do with my - I thought neat - solution of having a separately POP'd box configured within my mail client into which I move inbound client emails addressed directly to me so they're collected rather than having to manually create a ticket, paste in the contents and upload the attachments?

Hi I've been wondering why I keep seeing this message in client-submitted tickets: "Attachment winmail.dat blocked - file type not allowed." I have an "Incoming" ticket department. If a client emails me directly I simply move the email from my Inbox to the "incoming@" inbox and it pipes the mail into a ticket. This works nicely. And so I was able to catch the problem this time. The email had a .docx attachment. I had a suspicion that might get removed. When it arrived in the system it had indeed been removed and the above message appeared. This time, because I had kept a copy of the email, I was able to add a reply and attach the file myself. That works fine. The problem is only when the email is piped into the system. "Allowed File Attachment Types" has the following: .jpg,.gif,.jpeg,.png,.txt,.pdf,.zip,.xls,.xlsx,.htm,.odf,.doc,.docx,.rar,.psd,.ppt,.pptx What am I doing wrong? Thanks, Mark

I've managed to get the SMTP configuration to work. I specified the sender as "projects@". So all outbound email goes from projects@ however when the client's reply is piped back into the system it doesn't modify the existing ticket's department which in this case remained "Support", so that seems to work. Hopefully now, the recipients' mail clients won't mark the emails as spam.

I've been playing around with the settings. Using a test account: if I edit "Profile" and for the main contact on the page I turn off the Invoice notifications using the tick box in the list, and save that - then go to Contacts, find the billing contact, and do the opposite - tick the same setting on that page (this is the bit I was missing, assuming that marking the contact as the billing contact would be enough) - and then I generate an order.. the invoice does only go to the billing contact. It doesn't matter whether you select who is the billing contact on the Profile page - that doesn't do anything. You can leave it blank and the above still works.

Hmm. This means we can't use WHMCS for billing, as it can't send the invoices to the right person, meaning we won't get paid. This is a show-stopper. One of the reasons we migrated Kayako and QuickBooks to this was to bring the two things together but what we're left with is a ticketing system that's inferior to Kayako's (OK, that's a specialised ticketing system and we can put up with a loss of some functionality, we weren't using the complex features) and a monthly bill of about the same size. I wouldn't have embarked on this path if I'd known that we wouldn't be able to achieve the objective because one really basic, essential feature is missing. I've migrated everything from QB into this system - but thankfully I didn't cancel QB , as we're going to have to go back to using that and reactivate all the scheduled repeat invoices. The other problem as mentioned in that thread is the CCing of everything to the account holder. This is already having the effect that we're not getting replies because the emails don't discern between "this is for you to deal with" and "this is a copy of something someone else is dealing with". I guess I'll now have to remove all the products from WHMCS and with that all the "Store" features in the client portal. I suppose the alternative would be to somehow stop WHMCS emailing the invoices, pull them down as PDFs and email them to the customer billing contacts manually which doesn't compare with QuickBooks' ability to generate and send them automatically (to the right person). A few things to think about. I suspect we may have to drop WHMCS altogether 😞 but we shall see.

Hi We have clients set up and under the clients - usually - a number of contacts. One of them is the Billing Contact (Clients > Client > Client Profile tab). The account owner is only the recipient for the invoices for about half of our clients. For the other half it's someone else. The account owner has no interest in receiving or seeing the invoices and doesn't want the emails. However it still emails the invoices and payment receipts to the account owner. Setting the billing contact doesn't seem to do anything. What am I missing.. 🙂 Thanks, Mark

Hi I'm a bit puzzled at how to set this up in the system.. We have four mailboxes and four ticket departments to match (e.g. projects, support..). However in the configuration for POP in each of those departments you can't specify the sending server, only the incoming one. That's fine for picking up the inbound mail. The problem this causes is that if I use the inbuilt SMTP clients won't see ticket replies because that is not the designated mail server for the domain. So they get marked as SPAM or canned altogether at the receiving end. We need to use the designated mail server. In General Settings I can override that and specify the official SMTP server for the domain, plus the email address and the password. But that would seem to mean that all outbound email will always go from the same mail address since there's only one box to put it into, not one per department. Suppose we use "projects@" as the SMTP sender. Thus someone emails support@, it gets piped into the Support department, we reply, and it comes from projects@. If they reply to projects@ will it go back into support@ because it knows that the ticket exists? (I can't actually get the SMTP configuration to work anyway - it keeps locking up and failing even though the details are right, but that's another thing.. I don't want to persist with that if even when I succeed, this set up won't work) Thanks, Mark

Hi Brian I haven't got around to this yet but in the meantime I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write a detailed reply, that's very helpful. Thanks, Mark

Hi I've been setting up our client area and there's one thing that I cannot find how to do, which is to stop anyone registering. We're a consultancy. We will sell domains and email, and some cheaper hosting packages, but not on their own - only with a consulting account. People can't just sign up for those online. I can see that I can disallow registration without an order, but this still leaves open the possibility that people can register. It also allows the customer to create another separate account at order time. I need to get rid of both of those options. Ideally "Store" and any resold services would not appear in the menu until the customer has logged in. Does anyone know how I can accomplish that - do I need to open some templates and wrap some PHP code around the links so they only render if the customer has already logged in? Thanks, Mark

Not critical, but have been experimenting with WHMCS for the first time and came across this. It seems to have created an invoice of invoices and this is corrupting the totals.

I'd expect to have to do some things a bit differently, but then the way we do things now is in part "what used to work with Kayako" and that's not to criticise Kayako in any way, it has worked very well for us, but we don't use the more sophisticated features either, it's much more like looking at an email client with folders and email threads that just happen to accumulate time spent on them and which can be flagged and put in the right order of priority. Thanks so much for taking the time to write a detailed reply - that's very helpful. It looks like we're on the right path. I shall get the project management add-on.

Hi Looking for some help with our scenario. We're looking to migrate to WHMCS from a combination of QuickBooks and Kayako. With respect to client billing, we're a consultancy and we charge for our time. We log every client request as a ticket and when the ticket is worked on, we log the time used within Kayako. We also place work items as tickets into the system and use a custom field in a ticket to log an estimate for that work. In this way, there isn't a distinction between "projects", "project items", and "tickets". They're all tickets. In part because this is how Kayako works. It is then possible to pull a report which lists tickets for a client with the time used, so that if they have one of our Contract accounts we can see how much time they've used this month and if they have a Pay As You Go account (like a retainer) we can send periodic statements of the amount of time they've used and how much they have left. The actual statements are done with other software but Kayako provides the ability to create an Excel extract which feeds it. How might we achieve this with WHMCS? Thanks, Mark