Client charged twice (twice)

[maknet]

Wondering if anyone have had this problem.

 

This version of WHMCS has been running fine and unmodified for like a year. Recently in the past week, two clients have been charged twice inexplicably.

 

Nothing has changed on the server, cron only runs once, and the activity log doesn't show any duplicates.

 

They have only charged these two clients TWICE.

 

The charge is made during the regular cron (like 6.30 AM). (I refund them at the payment processor, but as far as WHMCS thinks, it only sent one request).

 

The only thing special about these invoices is that the client's credit card had been declined on the 1st. So they updated their credit card and then when it tries to auto-bill (like, say on the Jan 10th), it does it twice.

 

Currently running WHMCS 5.2.4.

Only have one custom module, made by whmcs.com, to process @ Moneris ($USD as a secondary currency).

 

Anyone have any ideas? (Either if you've seen this before, or other ideas to debug?)

 

Thanks,

Edited January 15, 2014 by maknet

[WHMCS John]

Hi,

Do you see to transactions for the invoice or only one?

Do you see record of two payments under Billing > Gateway Log or only one?

[maknet]

They both only show the 1 payment, which i found strange.

 

Basically the 2 clients complained, we checked the transactions on the invoice + the gateway log, and it both said it happened only once, so we shrugged it off a misunderstanding.

 

When they insisted that it was double-charged, we logged into the payment gateway and lo' and behold, there were 2 charges, like 1 second (or less) apart.

[maknet]

I'm not sure if this is related, but today a client got a "Notice #3 of 3" email for an invoice, but it was marked as paid yesterday already.

 

There is also no record in the client's history that Notice #3 was given.

 

Kind of feels like a delayed cron or something, but that just makes no sense.

 

Any ideas here? Even far-fetched ones?

[nathany]

Have you recently moved WHMCS and left the cron job running against the old instance? This would explain why customers are receiving notifications but there is no trace in WHMCS (as you'd be looking at the 'wrong' instance).

[maknet]

Unfortunately, that's not it. We haven't changed the cron or instance of the files in a while.

 

The thing that I can see are common for all of these issues above, is that I did it "manually" before it happened the next day.

 

Like, i manually clicked on "charge credit card" or I marked the client as paid.

 

For the e-mail notice, i also changed them from INACTIVE to ACTIVE, not sure if that's why? Maybe I shouldn't manually do that and let the system do it?

 

Any crazy ideas are welcome!

[WHMCS John]

Hi,

Which payment gateway was used here? If it's PayPal or 2Checkout or similar, perhaps the client made a manual payment forgetting they already had a subscription in place to send payment automatically?

[maknet]

In the case at the top, it was using Moneris $USD to charge manually. (This is a secondary module that WHMCS wrote in addition to the built-in Moneris $CAD payment gateway).

 

For the last case where they got a "Notice #3", it was manually marked as paid by "mail in check".

 

Do you know if setting / resetting the INACTIVE / ACTIVE / CLOSED flag on a client does anything? That's the only other thing I think i did. It just seems strange and normally i'd chalk it up to a random gremlin, but these many errors in succession feel too coincidental.

[WHMCS John]

Hi,

Changing a client's status wouldn't affect invoicing (unless you have any custom hooks or addons that would).

[maknet]

Hi,

Changing a client's status wouldn't affect invoicing (unless you have any custom hooks or addons that would).

 

Hm, no custom hooks. The only customization was the Moneris Add-on that we paid WHMCS to custom-program.

 

Oh well, hopefully it doesn't come up again. Just seems like a weird "hiccup" where the cron hits a page, and the server doesn't know that it requested payment (or marked it as paid).

 

When notices (or charges) are made by the cron-job, do you know whether it calculates payment-status on the fly? Or is there another table or register somewhere that records this that might be out of date?

 

Thanks for your input.