Can it do this?

[eng911]

These are limitations of modernbill that I have asked about but never got an answer to or found out it can't be done.

 

- Client holds back payment for months then sends a cheque for a few hundred to be applied to say 18 different invoices. In MB I have to enter a manual payment to each invoice individually and it takes way too long.

 

- Same scenario as above but client wants to use Paypal to pay his total balance in one payment with one click.

 

- When an invoice goes out I want it to have the oustanding balance on it .... is that too much to ask?

 

I am using v5 ....anyone have any trouble with the convert script?

[Matt]

WHMCS will not do the above either.. sorry!

 

Matt

[Dominic]

WHMCS will not do the above either.. sorry!

 

Matt

If single invoices can be paid with credit at the time they're created by the cron job, could you add a feature to run through a client's credit level and pay/set the credit balance against any outstanding invoices?

 

- When an invoice goes out I want it to have the oustanding balance on it .... is that too much to ask?

WHMCS does do this surely - it's in the details on the invoice e-mail I thought. And displayed in the PDF, and through the client centre. So long as he's meaning what I think he is!

[Matt]

- When an invoice goes out I want it to have the oustanding balance on it .... is that too much to ask?

WHMCS does do this surely - it's in the details on the invoice e-mail I thought. And displayed in the PDF, and through the client centre. So long as he's meaning what I think he is!

I was thinking what he wanted was to have the balance of all 18 invoices shown that the client is due to pay. WHMCS will of course show the balance of the invoice the user is viewing but not collect them all together into one.

 

Matt

[Dominic]

- When an invoice goes out I want it to have the oustanding balance on it .... is that too much to ask?

WHMCS does do this surely - it's in the details on the invoice e-mail I thought. And displayed in the PDF, and through the client centre. So long as he's meaning what I think he is!

I was thinking what he wanted was to have the balance of all 18 invoices shown that the client is due to pay. WHMCS will of course show the balance of the invoice the user is viewing but not collect them all together into one.

 

Matt

Ah yes - MB's "register balance" term. That would be handy to show in the client area. A little UNION SELECT - in fact I might write something to do that now - all I then need is an API action to 'mass pay from credit balance'.

[eng911]

Yes I was thinking that it would show the whole balance for all outstanding invoices.

 

With every bill I get from every company I do business with, if I don't pay the bill for say $20 then next month it shows the total that I owe as $40 not just another invoice for $20.

 

I don't understand why a billing system would ever be made to work like that?

 

And why would I want a customer to have to pay 18 invoices individually, which would take along time. If I don't pay my cable bill for three months they don't make me send them 3 checks. They put the total owed on the invoice and I pay a single payment to cover all outstanding invoices.

[Dominic]

It's a matter of preference and, also, what's appropriate for a given level of complexity in the industry.

 

For example, I might have an old account which I don't want to renew. But in the mean time, I want to register a new one. My outstanding invoice shouldn't prevent my new order being setup. I'm sure in time it'll be a tiny little checkbox like all the other powerful features which in MB are completely unintelligible and long-winded

 

Additionally since WHMCS is primarily for an online industry (though it does a lot more of course - I've used it for some quite insane things and it's brilliant), payments can be taken automatically.

 

So even if you had 18 invoices due on one date (you wouldn't - WHMCS groups them as items under a single invoice), the system would take all the payments automatically (assuming you're using a card gateway or similar)

 

As the user base grows larger, the situations of the users diversify and people like yourself, who require feature X, come along. That's probably the answer to why WHMCS doesn't yet do this feature - because it's not really a main sticking point and hasn't really been requested. Well, assuming Matt doesn't have a blocking technical reason for not adding it - I'm just guessing here of course.

 

All that aside, the client area is completely customisable and showing a 'total outstanding' balance, along with a button to generate an invoice for that amount and to then e-mail you, would take about 20 minutes. I think there's been talk of a proper credit note system, too. :mrgreen:

 

Just then need the functions to mass-pay since I'm presuming the system only tries to add credit to the invoice at generation time, rather than on each run of the cron.

[impactgc]

"My outstanding invoice shouldn't prevent my new order being setup."

 

I would say YES you would want an outstanding balance to prevent you from order another product. You should have to pay the outstanding balance before ordering anything new.

 

I do agree that customers should not have to process 18 invoices -- if they pay a one amount it should credit the invoices out standing(oldest first) until the credit is used up.

 

Thanks,

Adam

[eng911]

MB has an option to process new orders with an outstanding balance or not.

 

It's just one issue. The biggest issue for me is making it as easy as possible for my customers to pay. That means paying all outstanding invoices with a few clicks and being able to know how much they owe in total as each invoice comes in.

[DigitalEnigma]

I would say YES you would want an outstanding balance to prevent you from order another product. You should have to pay the outstanding balance before ordering anything new.

 

But what if your client is on a monthly billing cycle and is at that point in the month when the next renewal invoice has been generated and they want to setup an additional account?

 

Why should we force the client to pay the invocie early just so they can have an additiona account setup?

[impactgc]

Outstanding balance to me is any overdue invoices -- that would not count in my book -- invoices that are created 3-4 days before the due date are not considered outstanding

 

Thanks,

Adam

[skylap]

two things we would not want to see in whmcs

 

1. totals paid by client in their client area

 

( people over at MB were trying to get that removed )

 

2. new orders held back by previous owing invoices

 

( some clients forget to pay sometimes by accident, but they do buy multiple hosting accounts which far outweigh any old invoice owing. )

 

sometimes we find a client has not paid for several months, we just delete the invoices and group the payment into a single invoice and send that off.

 

thanks.

[impactgc]

Sky-

 

New orders should be held back if invoices are owed.. What if they owe 2 or 3 invoices and own $50 or some other amount -- you would allow them to keep ordering add-ons, new hosting etc?

 

How is this good business? I can understand the customers that may forget etc.. Have the order in queue or present the customer with their outstanding balance so they can make a payment on it. If they "forgot" then they will pay - if not - then maybe you shouldn't have them ordering everything under the sun.

 

"but they do buy multiple hosting accounts which far outweigh any old invoice owing. "

 

What if you didn't get paid? would it still outweight the invoices owed? I don't think so.... Bottom line is you want to get paid for services you rendered - allowing them to purchase additional services may not force them to pay there outstanding bill.

 

I would say give more options when setting up a feature like this-- cause each business model is different.

 

Thanks,

Adam

[Dominic]

I would say give more options when setting up a feature like this-- cause each business model is different.

Exactly....these things aren't mutually exclusive. So if enough people want it, I guess it could be added as a feature. I think I've seen it mentioned before, so maybe someone's already got it as a custom mod.

 

One other example of a powerful feature in WHMCS that's just a simple checkbox is Continuous Invoice Generation. Probably takes 6 months to figure out in MB, if it's even possible!

[eng911]

Can you explain the continuos invoice feature?

[MACscr]

An invoice should not be linked to a particular product or order. It should be linked to what is due the day the invoice is created. So if its 20 products, so be it. If its invoices that havent been paid in the past, they should be included too. I completely agree that there needs to be a better method for invoicing and paying current amounts owed. My customers get confused all the time when they have 5 different invoices to pay and they have to add up the totals themselves and reference many invoices #'s for their own book keeping.

[skylap]

impactgc

 

Well we have different business models, some of our clients have a very high number of accounts and they are middle men for their clients.

 

some of our designers have for example 50 - 80 websites which we bill them and they bill their clients, if their clients are slow to pay we are not going to stop our client from purchasing 6 more accounts this week because of some over due invoices.

 

we have found here the issue with whmcs is that when clients signup they can't get auto recurring from 2checkout like paypal does with subscriptions, unless I am missing something I usually create the auto recurring link in 2checkout and chase up clients with those the following month, many we have not done it that way and they prefer to pay upon invoice.