explain billable item recurring

[durangod]

Hi, just read the docs and this part of the billalble item confuses me.

 

So if i want to bill someone $50.00 for misc services once a month for 3 months how would i do that in billable items.

 

the recurring option says this.

 

recur every _____ _____(drop down days, weeks, months, years) times

 

 

There is no input for times, why is times there, it is confusing the heck out of me. If there was a ___ for times i would understand but i dont.

 

Help me to explain please.. thanks

[Interinize]

To bill someone $50.00 once a month for 3 months using billable items, you would use the following configuration in WHMCS.

 

~ Recur Every 1 Months for 3 times. ~

 

This is essentially telling WHMCS to bill the client once every month for 3 months.

 

Hope that helps!

[durangod]

Thanks i think maybe you may have misunderstood though. There is no times, that was my question. Take a look at that add billable item again and look at the recur every option.

 

The word times is there but there is no input for times. There is an input for recur every 1 month, but there is no input for how many times. Thats what i was saying how do i tell it how many times there is no place to type in how many times i want this to happen.

[durangod]

Is this just my imagination, or is there no place on that billable form to input how many times i want to bill them?

 

 

I would also like to know how to do the invoice on a billable item right away without waiting for the cron job to do it? If i do a billable item and i want to send them an invoice right now, how do i do that? I don't see an option for that.

Edited April 29, 2012 by durangod

[durangod]

So after playing with the billable items, it appears as i said that the word "times" in recur option is just a placebo and has no meaning.

 

I guess what i have to do is if i have a customer that i finance a service of example $300 and i want them to pay it out over monthly payments of 50.00, i have to divide 300 by 50 = 6, then i have to go in and set up 6 seperate billable items and set the due date to the appropriate day and month for all 6 payments and just forget about the recur option as it means nothing. Just select the option for "invoice as normal for due date" that way they will get a invoice every month for 6 months.

 

sure would be a whole lot easier if we could just use how many times in recur option but sadly there is no imput for that field value.

[laszlof]

The "Times" is certainly out of place. I believe it just allows you to recur payments every X amount of time indefinately until the recurring payment is cancelled. So theres not really a way to do "X per month for Y months" as you pointed out.

[durangod]

Thanks i thought it was just me lol.. I kept clicking on the word times to see if another window opened up or something.

 

Fyi the Y part of that equasion is in the docs. So i think maybe they need to fix that in the documentation and take the Y equasion out of the text in docs. Another case where the docs confuses and misleads people.

[laszlof]

Oddly enough, the database also already has the fields to account for "Y" as well. It seems it was just missed in the admin section. I wonder if you manually enter the recurring limit in the database if it will work properly..

[durangod]

Interesting, yes i put a value in the field in the db and nothing new on the screen. So maybe they just discontinued it and forgot to remove the guts, who knows. Pretty shotty work in my opinion, obviously they did not test that part of whmcs after making mods. Sad sad sad...

[Interinize]

I believe this may be just an oversight by the WHMCS dev team. Going into Billable items by Billing => Billable Items => Add New and the box allowing you to enter the number of times is certainly missing. However if you go into a Client Profile => Billable Items (Tab) => Add Billable Item, it does allow you to enter the number of times you'd like the billable item to recur.

 

Perhaps use this as a work around in the mean time?