[confirmed] Mass payment issue

[elialum]

Hi,

 

We've just found a nice way to open a ticket to our billing department.

 

Note the following scenario -

 

A client has 2 invoices for $1 each (total $2 needed to be payed)

 

Client logs into the client area, chooses "mass payment".

WHMCS will generate a 3rd invoice for $2, that is "linked" to the other $1 invoices.

Once the 3rd invoice is payed, all the 3 invoices are marked paid.

 

After a couple of days, the client decided he want to download his PDF invoices and logs into the client area.

Now he has 3 invoices - two $1 invoice, and one $2, all marked as paid.

 

A support ticket opened to our billing department asking for an explanation.

 

---

 

Now, sarcasm aside - Is this intended or a bug ? I think it will be best to simply merge the invoice, without all the hassle described above.

 

Eli.

[WHMCS Nate]

Eli,

 

I think there are two important questions here:

 

1) Is this the behavior the software authors intended?

2) Is this the best possible behavior for the software to have?

 

This behavior does sounds like the kind of behavior I would expect the product to do. Orders are linked to an invoice, so the making a new transaction marking the full payment and indicating on the invoice linked to the order that it has been paid both make sense.

 

The ideal behavior is a harder question. I would like to open a case with our development team and have them discuss it further. There are a number of factors and uses cases here and I want to make sure we get all of them correct.

 

I have opened case 4367 to track our internal discussion about the ideal way to handle this in the future.

 

Have a great day,

 

Nate C

[WHMCS Nate]

Hello,

 

We have discussed case 4367 in our triage meeting today. We decided that ultimately the current behavior is the correct behavior. Many of our customers operate in countries where once an invoice is created it can never be deleted or modified. I understand this can be confusing to customers, we have taken some steps to make it clearer what is going on.

 

First off, we list the invoice names and numbers for all invoices paid in a mass payment as line items in the mass payment invoice. Second, when a customer goes to view open invoices, we hide the mass payment invoices - so that the totals shown are accurate. We are open to suggestions of ways to communicate this more clearly, however auto-merging invoices is not a default behavior we can consider because of how many customers require fixed invoicing.

 

Have a great day.

 

Nate C

[elialum]

Hi,

 

Thanks for the update, sounds reasonable.

 

You can consider zeroing the original invoices, since the payment "moved" to the mass payment new generated invoice. Less confusing IMHO.

 

Unfortunately, WHMCS invoices are not acceptable here is Israel, so we had to disable this feature.

 

Just as a side note, to make it compatible to Israeli laws -

 

* We changed the names of the invoices to "orders", and made the invoice page looks like a "detailed order page".

* Any WHMCS invoice is linked to a 3rd party approved invoice generator (lot's of hooks & API)

 

Keep up the good work !

 

Eli.