Domain invoice created when not requested! What did I do wrong?

[PC-Mike]

Hi,

 

An existing client of mine wanted to buy a domain for a mate of his, and pay for the first year for him, but the mate would then pay in future years.

 

I figured the best way to do this was to register the mate as a new client without notification sent. That worked fine.

 

Then I added a new order of a domain to that new client, and set it to not create an invoice. That seemed to work fine at first..... or so I thought!

 

I then manually created an invoice for the existing client who was paying for the first year, and left myself notes on both accounts to explain what had happened for future reference.

 

I then activated the domain and registered it with NEO.

 

I then manually edited the next renewal date to be in a years time so that an invoice would be created for the new client for the following year's billing next Oct. I went to bed happy it was all sorted.

 

Wake up this morning to find that the cron script has auto-generated an invoice for the new customer, and sent it. Sent with today's date as the invoice date, yesterdays date as the due date, and 17th Oct 2011 - 17th Oct 2012 as the renewal period!!! What???

 

So it clearly went wrong somewhere in there.

 

To make matters potentially worse, I have cancelled that invoice so that the new customer doesn't get pestered by it, and have emailed them to apologise for the accidental invoice, however, presumably next year a correct auto-invoice won't get generated either.

 

So where did I go wrong?

 

Why did the system create an invoice anyway despite the dates suggesting it shouldn't have done so until next year?

 

What should I do now to make sure that an invoice is still correctly generated next year for the period 17th Oct 2011 - 2012?

 

Thanks in advance for your help...

 

Mike

 

p.s. it was late and I'm sure the mistake is a really obvious one, and I just overlooked a box somewhere, but I can't work out where!

[WHMCS John]

When you added the domain to the new client what did you set the Expiry and Next Due dates to?

[PC-Mike]

Hi John,

 

Thanks for the reply. The expiry already said 17th Oct 2011 by itself (i.e. I didn't change that bit), which would be correct, being one year from now. I had manually updated the next due date to 17th Oct 2011, so that it should create an invoice next year. However for some reason it sent an email overnight for the period 2011-2012.

 

Looking just now as the expiry and due date listed on the domain, I see that expiry is still 17th Oct 2011, but that due date has reverted to 17th Oct 2010!!! I definitely remember changing this date last night, because after I changed the year, I debated with myself whether to also change the day to 10th or 7th or 17th, and settled on 17th Oct 2011 (unless for some reason the change didn't take correctly?). However, if for some reason that hadn't updated, surely it would have invoiced for this year?.... or would it have invoiced to add an extra year from the current expiry, hence 2011-2012?

 

If that is the case, then it sounds like I did everything correctly, but the change of due date didn't take for some reason, but at least my process was correct!

 

I assume that if this is true, then to fix the problem of invoicing correctly next year, I just manually edit the due date back to 17th Oct 2011, save the changes. Then next year it will issue an invoice to add an extra year, and since the expiry date is already 17th Oct 2011, then it will re-issue an invoice correctly for 17th Oct 2011 - 17th Oct 2012. Is this correct? Or is there something else I need to do?

 

As I say, I'm not sure why the due date didn't save last night, but there we go...

The main thing now is to check my process is correct for future tasks like this, and also to make sure I fix things so get the domain auto-generate an invoice to the new client next Oct for the year 2011 - 2012.

 

Mike

[PC-Mike]

John,

 

Can you confirm, that setting 17th Oct 2011 for the Due Date will fix this, or do I need to do anything else?

 

Mike