How to Handle Prepayments/Late Payments ?

[GKey]

Hello,

Ive been playing with WHMCS for some time now and as I am testing RL scenario’s, more questions start come up.

First of all I must say that my previous billing software was not Hosting oriented, but it was very flexible. I shall say it had different logic than whmcs (or other modern billing solutions), just because it was a bit old fashioned in many ways.

Anyways, now I am trying to understand how to use whmcs "properly". I have searched the forums and read the manual several times, but I think I am still missing some basic points.

 

At this stage all of my customers are corporate clients and they all pay using bank transfer, which means I shall be registering new customers manually and adding orders/payments manually. I will be using prorata billing mode with prorata date '1' and Charge Next Month '32' (so that no merging of months would happen). I would prefer to setup automatic account creation after first payment, not sure though, if it may cause problems in situations described below.

 

There are 3 most basic situations in my case:

1. A customer orders a service for 1 month on 15th of January and pays using bank transfer. It takes up to 3 days for a payment to arrive, so its received on 18th. There are 2 options here:

1.1 They want their service to be active on 15th

In this case as I understand an order shall be created on 15th, made active and "create account" box ticked. This will create an account ready for them to be used. When payment is received on 18th it shall be entered in add payments section of an invoice after which it will be marked paid. If we don’t receive payment in lets say 5 days (default value) account created on 15th will be automatically suspended.

The billing cycle for this order starts from 15th of January.

I guess this is the way it is most commonly done ?

 

1.2 The service will be activated as soon as payment is received on 18th.

In this case I am a bit confused if When shall the order be created in the system. The purpose here is to have billing cycle start from 18th.

If I create an order on 15th wont the billing cycle start from 15th as well ? What do I need to change so that the billing cycle would start from the date when I add the payment for this invoice ? (if its possible at all of course) And even if I do change that, will I need to manually adjust a cost to match 13 (from 18th) days but not 16(from 15th) ? (as the cost in an invoice is calculated for a date it was actually created)

So in short, can I create orders/invoices for Future services ?

 

2. A customer orders a service for 2 months on 15th and pays for both of those 2 months.

Unfortunately I couldn’t really test this situation as I was not able to generate an invoice for the second month. So if we take an example, service costs 10$ a customer takes 2.5 months of service (prorata...).

I make an order on 15th and customers pays cash on 15th for the whole 2.5 months - 25$. How shall I do the transactions/credits ?

The invoice I have on hand only has 5$'s on it, shall I add the whole 25$ to that first invoice ? (will it make next 2 invoices paid when they are generated ?) or I shall split up the whole amount, add 5$ to the first invoice (so it would be marked as paid) and the rest 20$ to customers credit ? or maybe add the whole 25$ to their credit ?

Whats the "proper" way of doing it ? (I just don’t really want some of the reports to look crazy because of wrong usage of software)

 

3. A customer orders a service for 1 month on 15th, but he is going to pay only after 45 days.

OK, this is a bit hard... customers account shall be active for all this period, which exceeds the max overdue period after which accounts are suspended. Any common workarounds for this situation (if any ?)

 

I apologize if this questions may seem a bit silly or if they have been already discussed. I’m just trying to understand how the standard procedures shall be done in whmcs.

I would be very thankful for your comment or if you could redirect me to a topic where this subjects have already been discussed.

Thanks in advance

GKey