jin Posted August 14, 2015 Share Posted August 14, 2015 (edited) Be careful your clients can get upgrades for free and you will have to pay them when they upgrade. WHMCS says it is normal, so I wanted to post about it to keep others from having major issues with their clients. Even my clients have told me my billing system is broken and lost trust in our ability to track their services. I will use two plans for this example, and base it only on the money Say you have plan 1 and 2, plan 1 is smaller than plan 2 so plan 2 is the upgrade. Plan 1 payment terms One Time/Monthly - 175.00 Quarterly - 450.00 Semi-Annually - 750.00 Annually - 1200.00 Plan 2 payment terms One Time/Monthly - 225.00 Quarterly - 500.00 Semi-Annually - 1050.00 Annually - 1800.00 Scenario: Client comes to you and purchases plan 1 and chooses the monthly billing term After 2 weeks the client wants to upgrade to plan 2 and chooses the yearly billing term So they will be going from 30 days to 365 and a larger plan, you would think that they would have to pay the difference right? Wrong, you have to pay them and give them the upgrade for free, if your system is set on fully automatic then good luck with fixing that. They will get the upgrade for free and 27 will be credited to their account, meaning you gave them the upgrade and you now have to pay them 27 for them upgrading to a larger plan and longer term. The 175 / 30 = 5.8 per day The 1800 / 365 = 4.9 per day You owe your client = 27 plus the upgrade. Rather than your client owing you approximate - 1650 Apparently the system doesn't calculate the longer term and only calculates the original monthly term and WHMCS feels this is OK. So now if you have 500 clients and they read this post they can all get bigger plans and you will owe all of them money on the difference. 500 clients * 27 = 13,500 I did this based on 2 plans but say there are 4 plans so that means they have 3 plans to upgrade too, they will get money for each upgrade they go to. So if they sit there and upgrade to plan 2 they get money then upgrade to plan 3 they get money then plan 4 they get money and they get all of the upgrades to those plans for free. I feel this is a broken system but WHMCS doesn't, maybe Obamanomics have taken hold of WHMCS What WHMCS told me the fix is, is to upgrade the client from monthly to yearly then upgrade them again from plan 1 to plan 2. Doing this you can no longer have your system on full automatic because the client can bypass you. And you will still be crediting their account at the first term upgrade, messing up your system, not to mention if you have 2000 clients and go through many upgrade changes. What a frigging nightmare. Edited August 14, 2015 by Infopro Catchy Title Modified 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snake Posted August 14, 2015 Share Posted August 14, 2015 I agree this is not acceptable, but unfortunately this is generally whmcs attitude whenever anything doesn't work properly to the point where it costs you money. Unfortunately because WHMCS is so cheap they work on a QUANTITY rather than QUALITY basis, so unless they have a lot of people complaining about the same thing, they do not care. There are other numerous workarounds to have to do to avoid situations where you lose money, it is literally dangerous to give many staff access to whmcs admin, you have to limit it to people who it inside out and know about all the bugs and workarounds so that nothing gets screwed up. This is not the only situation where customers can get stuff for free either, here are a few more we have experienced. 1. items randomly get left off invoices and never get billed again 2. next due dates do not get updated properly, so products never generate again. 3. items left in pending state even though order accepted, and thus doesn't get billed. 4. you make a change to customers billing but forget to check "re-calculate on save". I had a module written to solve this one. I have found and reported numerous bugs, which they refused to accept and blamed my system or some plugin, and I have always had to argue considerably to prove otherwise, eventually when they finally decide to test it on their own system and re-produce the issue and find it is in fact a bug after all. Quite recently I reported a bug on their own website, broken images/icons, this was simply a good will gesture on my part as their site is not my problem, the support guy treated it like a typical support issue and argued and argued with me that the site was fine and the problem was at my end, trying to tell me I had network issues and computer problems, even I proved the image was giving a 404 and did not exist. Eventually he assigned it to someone else who said "we are already aware of this issue and it is on the TODO list". So what was the point in the first guy arguing with me ? The thing is that the alternatives seem to be worse, I have tried Blesta, Box billing, i360 and one other, and they are very un-intuitive, poor documentation, even more lousy support and you really need to be a php developer to use most of them. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jin Posted August 14, 2015 Author Share Posted August 14, 2015 And here I am thinking it was only me with issues: 2 and 3 I am so tired of being WHMCS guinea pig, they always release these half done versions in order for us to find all the bugs and issues and fight with us the entire time when we find them. In the meantime we are the ones losing. The support said that my issue above is normal operation, I mean seriously, on a progressive payment term it is normal operation to let users get upgrades for free then make us pay them additional money just for them upgrading? I mean seriously, HUH? WHAT? This issue can easily be resolved with a simple modification to the due date, if a user upgrades from monthly to any other payment term adjust it, but no, instead let's just leave it and call it normal. The alternatives are looking better and better. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WHMCS Jimmy Posted August 16, 2015 Share Posted August 16, 2015 jin, I appreciate you taking the time to create this detailed thread. I apologize you had to go through that to get some help. I have been able to replicate this issue on my end and I would like to follow up with you in your ticket. Would you be able to provide me with your ticket ID so I can follow up with you there and get a case in with our developers as this behavior does not seem to make any sense to me either. Thank you. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jin Posted August 16, 2015 Author Share Posted August 16, 2015 Hello, Two support staff looked into it I gave them access and they confirmed it, they feel there is nothing wrong, they feel because the docs say it is so, it must be so. I'm pretty tired of dealing with this, feel free to look at the ticket: CYD-577985 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WHMCS Jimmy Posted August 17, 2015 Share Posted August 17, 2015 jin, thank you. I will look into this ticket and start reviewing it now. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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