Billing Extension - State of the art billing!

[Kian]

Official Announcement: Billing Extension 2.0.0 released  - (Changelog)

It has been a long time but after several months of development the refactoring of Billing Extension is complete. Billing Extension 2.0.0 is now ready for download. It comes with new architecture, code, style and features. We used the experience acquired in years of development with 68 releases of this module to rethink all the process.

• Improved Admin Interface
• Warning System
• VIES Support
• Enhanced Renewals
• Document Customization
• Online Contract
• Cookie Bar
• Monthly & Manual Invoicing
• Billing Preferences
• VAT on Credit
• Refunds
• Credit Balance
• Company Profile
• New Auto-Tags
• Advanced Late Fees system

Discover / Purchase »

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In Billing Extension there's all our billing experience acquired through years of work with hundreds of customers.

You can configure WHMCS in line with regulations and legislations in force reducing the weight of invoices on your time.

Discover / Purchase »

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Let's freeze your invoices

Information stored on invoices are fundamental for a correct accounting, for this reason these details shound't change over time.

• Snapshot for customer data, custom fields, currency and invoice header
• Admin Panel to modify snapshots
• Company profile properly applied to each invoice

Billing Extension "freezes" the issued invoices' data to avoid billing errors

Reducing your Paper-Flow

 

WHMCS generates a large number of invoices. We have decided to optimize this process with OneInvoice and OnePayment. Both allow to issue a maximum of one invoice per month for each customer.

• With OnePayment you receive a monthly payment from each customer
• Save up to 18% on transaction fees*
• 95% reduction on invoices issued and emails sent*
• Enhanced Renewals for an easier management of renewals
• Less invoices to record and print

* Calculations based on our case study

Tailor-made for you!

 

With Billing Extension you can customize invoices, proformas and credit notes individually with no limitations.

• New Auto-tags to personalize sequential numbering
• Suppressing unwanted invoices (eg. zero amount, full discount or fully paid by credit)
• Protect invoices from being edited or deleted

For an easier experience all options are manageable from settings page and grouped by categories.

Ready for Europea regulations

Thanks to Billing Extension WHMCS will be fully in line with the accounting requirements of the European Union. VAT MOSS? VIES? No problem.

• Automatic verification of VAT ID directly from VIES
• MOSS report and customized exports on spreadsheets
• Proper taxation for customers of foreign countries within the EU
• Support for cookie regulation

You can rely on a series of tools handling all aspects automatically.

A breath of newness

Automate your and your client's rights and obligations in line with your terms of service. You'll find many new dedicated pages to handle your billing needs.

• Inform customers and request consent for any changes to the contract
• Review your pending invoices at a glance from the Billing page
• Set late fees, global or advanced, all from one place

The best from WHMCS

As you know, WHMCS is a complex and feature-rich system, unfortunately some of its features are only hinted or completely missing. With Billing Extension we have fixed many dysfunctional sides to make the most of all its potential.

• Ability to create credit notes and unpaid invoices
• Correct invoicing of credit and overpayments
• Warning System to detect invoicing issues

Our goal is to keep improving both the module and the basic WHMCS features to provide an ideal user experience.

Customize your billing

All Billing Extension options are applicable globally, on groups or on individual customers. For example, you could use OneInvoice for all customers, OnePayment for a group only, and turn off automatic invoicing for specific customers. Basically, the most specific rule will have priority.

• Set multi-level rules
• New filters and options to export to spreadsheets
• Possibility of inserting an invoice text based on the customer type

Katamaze technology

Billing Extension includes a number of proprietary technologies that enhance the user experience for both the administrator and visitors.

• SorTables for displaying data
• Multilingual content with HereLang
• Optimal data entry with MagicInput

Discover / Purchase »

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[Remitur]

I seems great, and a fix to many billing issues of WHMCS.

It's definitely a major update of Billing Extension and, as you suggest in your doc, it's advisable to test it in a dev / test  sandbox environment before going on in production...

But the question is: how to get a licence for your module for test environment?  😉

 

[Remitur]

Just another question: I don't understand if SorTables, HereLang and MagicInput are "add on"

- included in Billing Extension

- included in Mercury

- or stand-alone modules which may be separately acquired...

 

 

[Kian]

2 hours ago, Remitur said:

But the question is: how to get a licence for your module for test environment?  😉 

If you already have an active license of BX you can request a dev-license for free otherwise we can provide access to our testing environment. This way you can immediately start "playing" with WHMCS & BX.

1 hour ago, Remitur said:

Just another question: I don't understand if SorTables, HereLang and MagicInput are "add on"

- included in Billing Extension

- included in Mercury

- or stand-alone modules which may be separately acquired...

They are js/php core classes that are included in all modules (Billing Extension & Mercury) like you can see from the example below (it's a page of BX with SorTables and a bit of MagicInput).

[Kian]

V2.0.1 Released on 07/09/2018

Thanks to all feedback received, we managed to quickly spot and fix some errors.

New:

• Viewing suppressed invoices: new page instead of "Invoice not found" alert
• Invoice suppression: new "Order Completed" page

Improved:

• Order View: improved the quality of information provided
• Small improvements in Utilities PHP class

Fixed:

• In particular circumstances invoice suppression wasn't working as expected
• Fixed some errors in the Upgrading tool of the module

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V2.0.2 Released on 11/09/2018

This is a corrective release in which we focused on making the process of invoice suppression more reilable and easier to use.
Billing Extension wasn't "catching" invoices paid with Automatic Credit Use. The same goes for orders manually added by admistrators simultaneously with the option to apply credit. Now this has been fixed and the module detects invoices fully paid by credit more accurately.
We've also added a new feature that prevents WHMCS from sending specific notifications (Invoice Created and Invoice Payment Confirmation) for invoices that have been suppressed for reasons described here. In the linked article you will also find a detailed description of our new Suppression Notification feature.

New:

• When an invoice is suppressed the module prevent WHMCS from sending any related email notification
• New option in Settings. You can select an Email Template to send when an invoice is suppressed
• The module creates log for all actions that occurr during installation in Activity Log

Improved:

• The module detects when invoice suppression is required more accurately
• Added new checks that make sure that Company Profile is updated correctly
• Company Profile. VIES is automatically disabled when country changes from intra-EU to extra-EU
• When Admin has no default language set in WHMCS the installer will use English
• Settings page. Improved redirects on change

Fixed:

• Installer error when importing Invoice Data Snapshots from WHMCS

Related Screenshots: 1, 2

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V2.1.0 Released on 13/09/2018

Many of you asked us to reintroduce Transactions page in clientarea. We gave to this project in our Lab the highest priority.
The new Transaction page uses DataTables. You can see a preview in the gallery of this release. We've also implemented a feature that can automatically add this page to your navbar.
Other than that, we continue improving the upgrade functionality that helps people to move from Billing Extension v1 to v2.

New:

• Transactions page for clientarea
• Option to add Transactions page in clientarea navbar
• The new TinyMCE of WHMCS 7.6.x is fully supported
• Customers accessing Enhanced Renewals when this feature is disabled are redirected to Access Denied page

Improved:

• The function that issues document numbers for proformas, invoices and credit notes has been hugely improved
• Depending on WHMCS version in use, Billing Extension will use correct TinyMCE
• Further improvements to Installer when upgrading from BX v1 and EU VAT Addon
• Small improvements to Tax Rules

Related Screenshots: Transactions page, Transactions navbar, Clientarea settings, Restricted access

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V2.1.1 Released on 19/09/2018

We tuned some features and make it possible to translate language files of module with Language Overrides.
Now we're working on implementing Fatturazione Elettronica and Marca da bollo with a brand new concept in WHMCS: plugins!

New:

• Online Contract: as a client is deleted the module deletes also information about contract acceptance
• As a client is being added to WHMCS from admin interface, the module automatically accept contract version for him
• Module's Language files overrides. Customize translations in the same way you do for WHMCS

Improved:

• Online Contract. Improved functionalities

Changed:

• In few section was possible to see the codename we used while developing Billing Extension. We changed that
• VIES Client Custom Field. Now you can leave "None" but VIES will not work

Fixed:

• Error on servers with PHP 7.0 that were using ionCube 10.2.x and BX package with PHP 5.6+ support

[Chris74]

It looks like there have been some improvements to this module and I would consider trying it again. We used it a few years ago and it had too many problems, so I was forced to remove it. Would like to hear from folks who are successfully using this version and would like to hear some feedback about the new "all in one" domains and product pages. Do your customers like it?

I'd also be interested to understand more about the functionality for auto renewing products. Specifically the option to disable and enable auto renew on hosting plans. This is a major feature missing from WHMCS and we have been using the Modulesgarden "Hosting Renewals" module. Unfortunately this module causes problems with the daily cron and we've found hosting plans where the next due date has been set to 00/00/0000 or the year has been set to 1999 or 2000 - and causing hosting plans to be suspended and terminated. We are looking for an alternative.

I'd like to know how your module handles the renewal of hosting. Is it in the same way as domains? Where an invoice is simply not raised if auto renewal is disabled?

[Kian]

18 minutes ago, Chris74 said:

I'd also be interested to understand more about the functionality for auto renewing products. Specifically the option to disable and enable auto renew on hosting plans. This is a major feature missing from WHMCS and we have been using the Modulesgarden "Hosting Renewals" module. Unfortunately this module causes problems with the daily cron and we've found hosting plans where the next due date has been set to 00/00/0000 or the year has been set to 1999 or 2000 - and causing hosting plans to be suspended and terminated. We are looking for an alternative.

I'd like to know how your module handles the renewal of hosting. Is it in the same way as domains? Where an invoice is simply not raised if auto renewal is disabled? 

There are two features involved in this process: Enhanched Renewals and OnePayment.

Enhanched Renewals is our idea of how products, domains and addons should appear and be managed by customers. It's an interface that allows customers to view, filter and manage all their domains, products/services, addons and configurable options on one centralized page. All items involved are grouped like you would expect. Let's say that for your example.com domain you have an hosting plan and a backup with 50 GB disk space as addon. In WHMCS you would see them as 3 separate items: example.com in My Domains, hosting account & backup in My Services with the 50 GB disk addon visible only when you click on the hosting. In Enhanced Renewals you see them as one item.

As for OnePayment, it's a separate feature that can improve Enhanced Renewals even more. It's our idea of how the renewal process should work. We think that WHMCS generates too many invoices and sends too many notifications. OnePayment allows you to generate monthly invoices and receive monthly payments for each clients. Let me quote myself from our documentation.

«OnePayment [...] allows you to receive a maximum of 12 payments per customer. Let's suppose you have 500 active customers with the same setup: 5 products/services 50 € each. Your Payment Gateway fees are 2.4% + 0.35 € per transaction. In this example you generate 30.000 invoices, pay 46.248 € transaction fees, send up to 120.000 email notifications every year. On the other hand, with OnePayment you would end up with 6.000 invoices, 38.050 € transaction fees and up to 24.000 email notifications. As you can see the number of invoices and email notifications has been reduced by 80%, saving 18% in transactions fees and most important reducing your reliance on paper.»

Basically every customer has a full month to say what domains/products he want to keep active with you. If he no longer wants to renew a domain, he can simply click the toggle you see in the screenshot I posted above (or Request Cancellation in case you don't want to use Enhanced Renewals). From clientarea customers can clearly see how much time they have in order to decide what services they want to renew or cancel. They can also see a preview of the amount of money that is due. The first day of every month they will receive the invoice with all products, domains and addons they decided to keep.

That said, if you want to learn more about both features, read the documentation for Enhanched Renewals and OnePayment. They have a lot of settings that I can't describe here in this post.

59 minutes ago, Chris74 said:

It looks like there have been some improvements to this module and I would consider trying it again. We used it a few years ago and it had too many problems, so I was forced to remove it. Would like to hear from folks who are successfully using this version and would like to hear some feedback about the new "all in one" domains and product pages. Do your customers like it? 

I'm not a customer 😄 but I can help you a bit. You won't find many people that can give you an answer. Most of our clients were already using Billing Extension v1 and the upgrading process to v2 is massive (Upgrade to version 2) since Billing Extension v1 and v2 are two separate modules and v2 is capable of importing settings from WHMCS, EU VAT Addon and v1 in this specific order. We are encouraging them to try the upgrade on a test WHMCS to make sure that everything is okay. Long story short the vast majority of them are still using v1 and testing/preparing for the upgrade to v2.

Anyway I won't hide that there have been some issues that have been documented in the changelog.

[Chris74]

Thanks for your reply. Can you please explain the process relating to the auto renewal of services...

Currently in WHMCS, invoices are generated for services automatically - and this can't be switched off unless the client chooses to manually cancel the product before the end of the term.
With your system, can I specify that I do not want to auto renew a hosting plan?
If so, can I do that before an invoice is raised or also after an invoice has already been raised, resulting in the invoice being cancelled?

If you support the above, how is this achieved? Is it the same way as with domains? in that the invoice is simply not generated?

Does your product include any enhancements for the choice of payment type? In WHMCS this is badly implemented - only one card can be added and it is added automatically without the customer's approval - and different payment methods can't be specified by the end user for different products. Does your module tackle any of these issues?

Does your module have any support for product reminders? I might be wrong but I think WHMCS has no provision for sending reminders about services, although it does for domains. If a hosting plan has auto renew disabled, is there a mechanism to remind them to pay manually?

[Kian]

21 minutes ago, Chris74 said:

Currently in WHMCS, invoices are generated for services automatically - and this can't be switched off unless the client chooses to manually cancel the product before the end of the term.
With your system, can I specify that I do not want to auto renew a hosting plan?
If so, can I do that before an invoice is raised or also after an invoice has already been raised, resulting in the invoice being cancelled?

If you support the above, how is this achieved? Is it the same way as with domains? in that the invoice is simply not generated?

Like you said you can't turn off invoice generation. We managed to achieve this goal by recreating from scratch the entire invoicing process.

The resulting invoices, notifications and more in general the entire process looks like it's powered by WHMCS but in reality it's Billing Extension. We recreated even the exact descriptions that WHMCS uses for items on invoices.

34 minutes ago, Chris74 said:

Does your product include any enhancements for the choice of payment type? In WHMCS this is badly implemented - only one card can be added and it is added automatically without the customer's approval - and different payment methods can't be specified by the end user for different products. Does your module tackle any of these issues?

Could you explain it better?

35 minutes ago, Chris74 said:

Does your module have any support for product reminders? I might be wrong but I think WHMCS has no provision for sending reminders about services, although it does for domains. If a hosting plan has auto renew disabled, is there a mechanism to remind them to pay manually?

Enhanced Renewals sends a consolidated reminder on a monthly basis. When people receive their monthly invoice few seconds later they also receive this notification.

[Chris74]

Ok but what if they have auto renew disabled? Will they still get a reminder?

Imagine the scenario where a client is not sure if they want to renew so they switch off auto renew. They still need reminding that the product is due for renewal, even if they don't get invoiced for it. With standard WHMCS, you can renew a domain without an invoice but you also receive reminders regardless of whether an invoice exists. It seems logical to offer the same option for services too.

Regarding payment type and cards etc...
If I place an order though WHMCS and pay by card, that card gets added to my account, even if I didn't want that to happen. This is pretty bad. I am forced to login and go to billing > Manage Debit / Credit Card to manually remove it.

Also, we know customers who really want to pay for different services with different cards or payment types - but in WHMCS there is no flexibility for this. They cannot add more than one card. The payment method is fixed for a particular service, depending on which method was used originally to pay for the order. This is not flexible.

With most billing systems you can add different cards, different billing or invoice addresses and payment types. This has more of a requirement with WHMCS where many clients have clients of their own. It would make sense for the client to to associate a different contact or card with an individual product. The options in WHMCS currently are woefully inadequate. You can add contacts but you can't directly associate different contacts with different products, or have different billing methods or cards associated with each contact.

You've completely re-written the invoicing system, so perhaps you can add in more functionality for contacts / addresses and multiple cards too?

My final question is this...

As you have totally rewritten the entire invoicing process, If I start to use your module -  then I decide to remove it later - how will that affect the invoices, transactions etc etc that were generated during the time your module was installed? If it is removed, will everything still appear the same as if WHMCS itself had performed all those processes?

[Kian]

1 hour ago, Chris74 said:

Ok but what if they have auto renew disabled? Will they still get a reminder?

Imagine the scenario where a client is not sure if they want to renew so they switch off auto renew. They still need reminding that the product is due for renewal, even if they don't get invoiced for it. With standard WHMCS, you can renew a domain without an invoice but you also receive reminders regardless of whether an invoice exists. It seems logical to offer the same option for services too.

I've been a little bit extreme on this topic. I think that people are exhausted of receiving hundreds of reminders therefore monthly invoice, monthly payment and monthly reminder. That's it.

Before releasing v2, I was using a more classical approach with multiple reminders. I don't know if it should be reintroduced.

1 hour ago, Chris74 said:

It would make sense for the client to to associate a different contact or card with an individual product.

There a pending feature that we still have to complete that allows clients to assign sub-accounts (their contacts) to specific groups of products from Enhanced Renewals. If you look at the screenshot I posted in my previous reply, you can see that there's a column with a drop down menu (Owner column). 

The client can also provide credentials of his Email Account so that your WHMCS sends expiration notices and reminders to sub-accounts using the email address of your client. Basically it's a 100% white label method to send emails. It's particularly useful for Web Agencies and Resellers. Anyway there's nothing to allow multiple billing accounts and credit cards.

1 hour ago, Chris74 said:

As you have totally rewritten the entire invoicing process, If I start to use your module -  then I decide to remove it later - how will that affect the invoices, transactions etc etc that were generated during the time your module was installed? If it is removed, will everything still appear the same as if WHMCS itself had performed all those processes?

It should not cause any trouble. We fill relids and "respect" billing cycles, dates and stuff like that. The resulting invoices are identical to ones generated by WHMCS. Anyway since this feature is a BIG change, as always I suggest you to test it before using it in production.

[Chris74]

Thanks for your detailed responses. I'm sorry but I'm still unclear about the reminders. Can you confirm that a client will still receive reminders to renew, even if auto renew is disabled for a service?

[Kian]

Sorry for the late reply.

When you use the toggle to disable the auto-renew from Enhanced Renewals page, Billing Extension turns off auto-renew for domains and submits a cancellation request for products/services. It doesn't abort the send of any reminder. WHMCS will act accordingly.

[Chris74]

Really? That doesn't make sense at all.

If you choose not to automatically renew something. It doesn't mean you don't wish to renew it. The client may want to renew the product manually.

Do you not differentiate between automated and manual renewals?

The client may also wish to renew their domain automatically, but not their hosting. In your above reply you said...

Quote

When you use the toggle to disable the auto-renew from Enhanced Renewals page, Billing Extension turns off auto-renew for domains and submits a cancellation request for products/services.

Did you really mean that? Simply switching off automated renewals will do that for a domain (even f you don't want to?) and cancel the associated hosting service?

Where is the logic in that? Domains and hosting are entirely different and should be independent. It looks like you've actually managed to make WHMCS even less  user friendly and reduced the functionality of the auto renew process by a long way.

How can you call it "enhanced" renewals when you've made it more restrictive?

[Kian]

Apart from managing products and see them grouped in a nicer way, the point of Enhanced Renewals is that customers can expressly declare their decision to cancel products/services or domains by simply clicking on the toggle. Plain and simple.

As for auto-renew, it's clear that when a customer expressly says «I want to cancel this domain», the module makes sure that auto-renew is disabled otherwise WHMCS will systematically ignore their decision. It would make no sense. On the other hand if he expressly says «I want to keep this domain», the module turns on auto-renew. If no action is performed, the domain will be renewed in line with their auto-renew settings.

59 minutes ago, Chris74 said:

Did you really mean that? Simply switching off automated renewals will do that for a domain (even f you don't want to?) and cancel the associated hosting service?

You misunderstood me. Of course it doesn't work in this way.

Domains and products/services (hosting accounts, SSL certificates, backups, VPS...) are managed separately. You can freely keep the domain and cancel the hosting and vice versa. As you can see from this screenshot there's a toggle next to every item so that you can manage renewals individually.

Edited October 1, 2018 by Kian

[Chris74]

You've not properly explained how it works. I'm more confused now than when we started this conversation. Either way it all looks far too complicated.

I like the way in WHMCS a client can enable or disable auto renew for a domain but still have the option to manually renew whenever they like. It works great. All I really want is the same option for hosting plans too. I think your addon has some great features but we wouldn't use most of them - and I'm sorry if this sounds unfair, but I've asked you some pretty straightforward questions and your replies just don't make any logical sense to me, so I don't think I could use your module. Thanks for your time anyway.

[Mark]

DO NOT USE THIS MODULE.

This module is very intrusive and hooks into everything. Documentation and support is always vague.
If you are a EU business: DO NOT use this module to try and create monthly invoices.
After finally being able to remove this plugin it completely broke our daily cron and the generation of client invoices.

STAY AWAY.

[Kian]

10 hours ago, Mark said:

This module is very intrusive and hooks into everything.

It's more than 10 years that the billing part of WHMCS is basically incomplete. It doesn't respect even the most basic rules of invoicing especially if you are an EU business. That said, of course the module uses a lot of hooks. It's huge and I'd say also extremely ambitious. We are dealing with problems that no one ever wanted to solve nor WHMCS, nor other developers.

Credit notes, unpaid invoices, apply tax on add funds invoices, VIES with scheduled & manual checks, dedicated sequential numbering for credit notes, suppression of unnecessary invoices, VIES response on PDF, invoicing overpayments, reference numbers, restrictions so that admins can't accidentally edit/delete invoices, monthly invoices & payments, manual invoicing, cookie law & cookie bar, user agreement system, snapshots of clients details, custom fields, currencies and of your own company details, tax stamps...

I could go on for hours listing things that are missing in WHMCS and required by EU regulations and laws and by Member States.

It's hard to keep such a massive module up to date in line with every small change of WHMCS that can be distruptive and with EU and Member States regulations that changes on a yearly basis. I'm not saying that the module is perfect, it needs time to be configured to match your needs. Sadly it's not plug-and-play like a Registrar module. I mean when I ask the same question to 10 accountants I get 18 different replies. That's not a typo, I literally get multiple answers from the same accountant. Every day we deal with things like this.

10 hours ago, Mark said:

Documentation and support is always vague.

As for documentation, we wrote 52 pages in english and 59 in italian completed with images and animated gifs. Next to every single setting and feature of Billing Extension you can find an "info" icon that redirects you to not only to the article of documentation but also to the specific part you were looking for (try me).

Anyway that's okay. Feel free to send me your ticket ID (if you opened one) so that I can take a look if you are still interested.

[Remitur]

On 10/1/2018 at 4:45 PM, Chris74 said:

You've not properly explained how it works. I'm more confused now than when we started this conversation. Either way it all looks far too complicated.

I've been using Billing Extension v. 1 for two last years, and right now I'm evaluating v. 2 in a sandbox before going live with it.

So, let me talk about my personal experience.

BX is a huge module, with lot of different functions, lot of possible customizations, and it's far from being perfect.

Of all the functions provided, I'm using just few of them: mainly, the one called "one invoice" (which allows to issue just one monthly invoice for every customer).

This function allowed me to reduce the number of monthly  issued invoices from about 1200 (yes, one thousand and two hundred) to about 150 (one hundred and fifty).
About 1050 invoices less every month. And accounting fees lowered accordingly.

Just this single function for me is more than sufficient to justify the module, and the work needed to configure and customize it. And even the issues consequent to its bugs (because, as every not-trivial software in this planet, it's not bug-free)

Billing is a complicated world, with many different problems. And it's true, WHMCS vanilla billing mechanism, for a company based in EU is almost useless, and sometimes also unlawful.
Katamaze's BX allowed me to get a lawful and quite  satisfactory solution.

It's not the perfect solution, but the perfect solution does not exist.
just yesterday, in the  very same days I saw two tickets from two different customers of mine:
- the first one: "I need a different invoice for every single different domain renewal"
- the second one: "For my own reasons, I need invoices in which are not specified the renewed and registered domains"

For the second one, WHMCS+BX give me a quite "off the shelf" solution.

For the first one, a solution would be possible; there's a function in BX which could allow me to do so. But it would be more difficult, I should go on issuing a dozen of invoices montly just for this customer, much more work, much more time, much more accounting expenses... so I'm going to answer to the customer "it's not possible", but it's not really true: the right answer would be "it should be possible, but it's too much expensive".
But if I'm able to choose what's the answer to give to my customer, it's just thanks to katamaze's module.   

 

[Remitur]

20 hours ago, Mark said:

DO NOT USE THIS MODULE.

My two-years experience with this mdule, as an EU-based company, it's quite different from yours.
I'm not unconditionally enthusiastic about it, but I do not see any better solution on the horizon, and find that ths module (with needed customizations and caveat) is usable.

But would like to know your experience, and the reasons why you find it unusable.   

[Remitur]

On 10/1/2018 at 3:19 PM, Chris74 said:

If you choose not to automatically renew something. It doesn't mean you don't wish to renew it. The client may want to renew the product manually.

Renewals different scenarios are many, are different, and not all of them are manageable.

The needs of a customer who has its own single domain and related hosting are differnt from the reseller who has 1500 domains and 400 differents hosting services... and it's difficult, or even impossible, to find a satisfactory solution for both.

So, you need to choose the most common scenarios, and find a way to manage them. because manage every possible scenario is almost impossible, and/or complicated, and/or expensive, and almost for sure far from being error-proof. 

in fact the big operators, that are addressed both to the final user and to the reseller, have nightmare billing systems, and far from being user friendly (I'm thinking, i.e., to OVH or Aruba).

I.e.: the fact that in WHMCS the domain and the related hosting service are not binded together is an issue; every week I have a ticket from a customer "Why should I need to pay this?! I yet paid it two months ago!!!" (and let's go explaining that two months ago he paid for the hosting, while right now he's called to pay for domain renewal...)
But if you bind them together, almost for sure will happen than some customer will renew hosting + domain, and then he'll came back again and find a way to renew again the domain... (remember Murphy's law: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.)

But how many customers are so undecided that they do not know whether or not they will renew hosting between, say, two weeks?!?!
So, IMHO, to manage their incertitude is not a problem of mine...

[Remitur]

A question for @Kian ...
In VIES support docs is reported that VAT numbers validity is checked  "With Cron Job when the latest check performed against VIES is too old" ...

What does it means exactly? How much time is "too old", and when/how often this cron job is executed?
Or is it needed to setup a specific cron job about this? 

[Jaspaert]

I'm testing the software now.

And it looks very interesting.  Even the upcoming sync numbers between 2 installations of whmcs  is so promising. 

Only the credit note part is a little strange.  Converting Proformas to a credit note, that I don't understand ....
Also creating a credit note from zero without a link to the original invoice, I don't understand.

But also not able to create an Credit note from an unpaid invoice, looks very strange to me. I have several unpaid invoices, that needs to be credited.
When I do a payment "none" I can create an invoice, through Refund, but than the lines are "Refunded Payment (Invoice #???)" .What is not correct.
for example the should be stand 

Hosting                                   €XX,XX
Domain ??????.??                  €X,XX

The word creditnote on top already indicate that it is an negative from an invoice. (but from the point of reports I understand it that those are negative)

I hope, but couldn't test it that the creditnote useses a special template, so we can add some obligated special text, that doesn't have to stand on the invoice.

What also is missing is the original date of the invoice. 

Maybe it would be nice to see on top op the invoice  CREDITNOTE  # ??? from INVOICE #?? (Invoicedate) (maybe it is possible with the template, but cann't check that out)

 

Hope that that will come to BX, and would glad to buy it.

 

 

[Kian]

First off sorry for the late reply but I'm fighting against Electroning Invoicing, a new concept that has been crafted to make people angry 😤

On 10/19/2018 at 12:04 PM, Remitur said:

A question for @Kian ...
In VIES support docs is reported that VAT numbers validity is checked  "With Cron Job when the latest check performed against VIES is too old" ...

What does it means exactly? How much time is "too old", and when/how often this cron job is executed?
Or is it needed to setup a specific cron job about this? 

Older than 30 days. The check is performed automatically on a daily basis with the cron job of WHMCS. There are the following limitations imposed by VIES:

• 10.000 overall requests
• Up to 5 validations for the same VAT Number

Limits reset every 24 hours. In other words BX checks a maximum of 10k VAT Numbers. If there are more than 10k records to check, the exceeding part is moved to next day. Long story short it's possible to check 300k VAT Numbers per month. This should be enough probably even for GoDaddy.

On 10/20/2018 at 2:02 PM, Jaspaert said:

Converting Proformas to a credit note, that I don't understand ....

Also creating a credit note from zero without a link to the original invoice, I don't understand.

Let me explain it with an example. Bob pays you 1000 euro for the development of his website:

• 250 euro for HTML
• 250 euro for template
• 250 euro for images
• 250 euro for logo

Few weeks later he realizes that he didn't need a logo therefore you owe him 250 euro. How can we legally fix the invoice of 1000 euro that has been already issued and paid? With a credit note. Now we have two options here.

1) Refund & Credit Note (long run)

Use the standard Refund feature of WHMCS to register the 250 euro refund. This way in case you are using a gateway like PayPal you can actually refund 250 euro to Bob but we still need to issue the credit note. Every time you refund a payment, right inside the Refund tab of WHMCS (invoice view) you'll find a new section (take a look at the above screenshot) that can be used to issue the credit note. Just select the checkbox next to our 250 euro refunded transaction and press Generate Credit Note. Here you go.

The credit note has been issued. Of course there's also a reference to the original invoice on the credit note.

2) Credit Note (the lazy way)

If you are in a hurry, you don't want to perform the refund process from WHMCS or you simply need to issue a credit note for a payment/invoice that for some reasons is not on WHMCS, you can skip the refund part. You can manually create a proforma and add the following invoice item «Refund because Bob doesn't need a logo even though his current logo sucks!» set the amount to 250 euro and convert the proforma into a credit note on the fly. That's it. Of course this approach is faster and easier but it doesn't leave any reference between invoice & credit note.

On 10/20/2018 at 2:02 PM, Jaspaert said:

But also not able to create an Credit note from an unpaid invoice, looks very strange to me. I have several unpaid invoices, that needs to be credited.

Your unpaid invoice I suppose that is a true invoice (not a proforma) complete with a number, date etc. Let's say that its number is 2018-100 of 01/01/2018. How can you directly credit this invoice? It wouldn't be correct. In this case you should issue a new and dedicated document (eg. Credit Note 2018-101 of 02/02/2018). Why? Because invoice 2018-100 could have been already registered by the accountant of your customer.

You can't create two versions of the same document. A true invoice once issued should be considered as dead body. You souldn't change even a single word. That's why BX doesn't allow you to credit an invoice.

Edited October 22, 2018 by Kian

[Kian]

@Jaspaert Maybe you could be interested in this project published few minutes ago in our Lab. We're going to add the possibility to issue credit notes based on invoice items.

Apart from that, Italian users may find interesting that Fatturazione Elettronica is now supported by WHMCS thanks to BX.

Bye!