WHMCS + GoCardless & Automatic One-Off invoices using an established mandate

[aquiss]

Hi Guys/Girls,

 

We have had a bit of feedback from WHMCS support directly, but, we are still at a little loss, so we feel opening up the problem maybe ideal, for us and maybe others.

 

One of our Payment Gateways is GoCardless, for UK Direct Debit payments. The majority of our customers have regular services/products that are generally billed monthly (though some exceptions) and a number of customers now have in place Direct Debit mandates with the gateway. This has recorded the mandate token within the subscription id's field on the product/services tab for the clients details.

 

The problem we have is that we also have services & systems that are generated outside of WHMCS and then we use "Create Invoice" API to add and create an invoice onto the clients account. Via this we also pass the gateway, such as gocardless, where required.

 

The above approach correctly generates the invoice, but, as the invoices being generated are not an established product/services we are concerned how we are able to take payments automatically via the Direct Debit mandate that has been established with GoCardless. How does WHMCS see the subscriptionid token? Can it handle one-off invoices via the same token?

 

I know we can use the "Add Billable Items" API to get the system to add things to a future generated invoice, which could pick up on the gateway. Its a workaround, but not ideal, especially as a few customers don't have a monthly service/product or the billing period means we could wait months for these to get picked up.

 

We have spoken directly to GoCardless, but they feel that the supporting documents are too weak to really give a firm answer if this is possible, though they would like to see it themselves and code up accordingly to support it. I notice that a similar token gateway, eWay in Australita, reveals some insights about making sure "Disable Credit Card Storage" is unticked in General -> Security. I'm not sure if this is something that we are overlooking??

 

There surely must be a way OR the system is already able to do it and we are overlooking a problem that may not exist in the first place.