Date Format per Client

[JayBird]

Hi - For years now I have struggled with two issues that I honestly cannot believe were overlooked when WHMCS was developed, or have since been added. For the record, these issues were raised years ago, and I submitted feature requests for both. Because it appears WHMCS primarily targets the US market, there is not enough interest in resolving the issues. Since the code is "protected", fixing them myself is not an option.

The first issue is the date display format. It would have been very easy to add another field to store the preferred date format either per user or per client. The US and Canada (along with a handful of lesser populations) totaling about 360 million people, use the format of MDY. The rest of the world, totaling nearly 6 billion people, use a different format. This has caused lots of confusion over the years for clients in the US, because I use the DMY format.

The second issue is some clients paid by PayPal or other payment method in USD, but now pay in EUR or one or two other currencies. Because currency is set per client, and not per invoice, my accounting is AFU (military term). For example, someone paying 100 USD in the past, and now paying in ISK (roughly 10.000) makes the accounting system useless.

Has anybody else had these problems, and more importantly, has anyone been able to fix them or otherwise found an effective way to work around them?

[brian!]

On 6/8/2018 at 15:19, JayBird said:

The first issue is the date display format. It would have been very easy to add another field to store the preferred date format either per user or per client. The US and Canada (along with a handful of lesser populations) totaling about 360 million people, use the format of MDY. The rest of the world, totalling nearly 6 billion people, use a different format. This has caused lots of confusion over the years for clients in the US, because I use the DMY format.

long story short, with access to the core code, it would be quite simple.... but trying to fix from the outside could be horrendous - you may end up having to modify every date variable... and they're not all made in the same way, so it might have to be horses for courses.

i've looked at it closely a couple of times and thought the solution was more hassle than it was ever worth spending time on.

On 6/8/2018 at 15:19, JayBird said:

The second issue is some clients paid by PayPal or other payment method in USD, but now pay in EUR or one or two other currencies. Because currency is set per client, and not per invoice, my accounting is AFU (military term). For example, someone paying 100 USD in the past, and now paying in ISK (roughly 10.000) makes the accounting system useless.

i'm wondering if "Convert To For Processing" could be used to get around that...

i've never had a client not pay in their currency, so I haven't ran into this personally.

On 6/8/2018 at 15:19, JayBird said:

Has anybody else had these problems, and more importantly, has anyone been able to fix them or otherwise found an effective way to work around them?

the fundamental design flaw of WHMCS assigning currencies to clients rather than invoices etc is not easily fixed from the outside - it would require significant changes that I don't think anyone has come close to trying... it really falls on WHMCS to do it, and that's a (dying of old age) waiting game...

[JayBird]

17 minutes ago, brian! said:

long story short, with access to the core code, it would be quite simple.... but trying to fix from the outside could be horrendous - you may end up having to modify every date variable... and they're not all made in the same way, so it might have to be horses for courses.

i've looked at it closely a couple of times and thought the solution was more hassle than it was ever worth spending time on.

i'm wondering if "Convert To For Processing" could be used to get around that...

i've never had a client not pay in their currency, so I haven't ran into this personally.

the fundamental design flaw of WHMCS assigning currencies to clients rather than invoices etc is not easily fixed from the outside - it would require significant changes that I don't think anyone has come close to trying... it really falls on WHMCS to do it, and that's a (dying of old age) waiting game...

Yeah, I think I have basically given up (again) on WHMCS being interested in looking into things like this. I think they are more interested in maintaining their cash cow. Funny how I blindly paid for support all these years, and essentially got nothing out of it. Pretty much everything I recall reporting was either a design flaw (IMHO), or a genuine problem with the product. Maybe time to investigate open source again. I don't like thinking about it, but 10+ years is long enough waiting for change.

[brian!]

5 hours ago, JayBird said:

Yeah, I think I have basically given up (again) on WHMCS being interested in looking into things like this.

the date format issue is ridiculous - surely it's not beyond the wit of man to have a db table, with various date formats defined in PHP language that we can use, or add to, ourselves... that's the easy bit, it's then getting WHMCS program to use the format that's the tricky bit....same could be said for currency formats too.

5 hours ago, JayBird said:

I think they are more interested in maintaining their cash cow.

I hope not, because it's only a matter of time before something better comes along...

5 hours ago, JayBird said:

I don't like thinking about it, but 10+ years is long enough waiting for change.

five years for me and that seems a lifetime... if i'm still here in 2023 and nothing significant has changed, vault this post and remind me!!