unpaid invoices question

[snake]

I have a bit of a dilemma.
I provide a service which is free but has paid addons.
So all customers have at least the free service.

It is becoming a regular issue (presumably due to the pandemic)  that customers card will be declined and stop working, so the invoices never get paid.
It may be that they have gone out of business due to the pandemic, but no way to know, due to complete lack of communication.

I don't want these  unpaid invoice  notification to just sit here forever,  but the only way to get rid of it is to cancel it.
I also do not want to allow these  customer to  come back and order anything else unless they pay the unpaid invoice first.

Any solution to this?

 

[brian!]

19 hours ago, snake said:

I don't want these  unpaid invoice  notification to just sit here forever, 

notifications in the admin area ?

19 hours ago, snake said:

but the only way to get rid of it is to cancel it.

there are addons available in Marketplace that can cancel overdue invoices or invoices of terminated services if you're looking to automate this.

19 hours ago, snake said:

I also do not want to allow these  customer to  come back and order anything else unless they pay the unpaid invoice first.

catch 22 - if you cancel the invoices, then you can't check for overdue invoices... 😕

this is really just a cart redirection hook based on a clients number of overdue invoices and i've posted hooks previously that a) redirect users from the cart based on conditions (and you could make one of those conditions not having overdue invoices) or b) prevent access to other pages until the client performs a particular task, e.g update their details... or perhaps in your case, until they pay their bills.

[snake]

OK, so I guess what I want to do is HIDE those unpaid invoices that are never likely to get paid, so WHMCS isn't constantly nagging me/reminding me about them. 

But if that client ever does log back into their account, they will be forced to pay the outstanding invoice before they can order something else.

[brian!]

1 hour ago, snake said:

OK, so I guess what I want to do is HIDE those unpaid invoices that are never likely to get paid, so WHMCS isn't constantly nagging me/reminding me about them. 

where? on the invoices.php page in the admin area ?? if so, I think that would be tricky.

[snake]

oh well, I will instead have to just resort to deactivate clients account and put a sticky note

[brian!]

about the only thing I can think of easily doing visually would be to move these clients to a client group - which would at least allow you to color their name in the list and identify clients with unpaid invoices but not yet overdue... though how much further that takes you, i'm not sure. 😕

[snake]

they are overdue, and no communication from clients, which is why I want to hide them, as they are probably not going to get paid.

[brian!]

18 hours ago, snake said:

they are overdue, and no communication from clients, which is why I want to hide them, as they are probably not going to get paid.

oh I get the issue, i'm just struggling to highlight/hide these mute users without also including someone who just has an invoice overdue... if you just look at unpaid invoices, they'll be in there... so it's making unpaid invoices not include overdue. 💡

aahh - how about giving these invoices a custom invoice status ?

then they wouldn't be included in either unpaid / overdue filters or counts in the admin area, but users should still be able to pay them from the client area... would also allow for users logging in to be checked to see if they have any invoices with this status and if so, they're going nowhere in the CA/cart until they pay their bills.

you could do that directly in the database...

or maybe use a cron hook to see if any invoices are long overdue and adjust their statuses accordingly.

there is a commercial module for this, Custom Invoice Status, but whether it works will v8 I don't know.... plus charging an ongoing nearly $100 a year seems a little steep to me for what it supposedly does.

[snake]

yes having a custom status is what I thought of too.

Wasn't sure if simply adding that to the DB would cause any problems though. But from what I have seen of how WHMCS works, it uses strings rather than ID's for matching rows in tables.

[brian!]

13 minutes ago, snake said:

Wasn't sure if simply adding that to the DB would cause any problems though.

not on the invoices table I  wouldn't think - there are tables where statuses can only be predefined values, but that isn't one of them.

visually, it would cause an issue on the invoices page as the custom status would be listed as "Unspecified" I think - but inconsistently, listed with the correct custom status when you look via the invoices tab in the clients profile.... but you don't want to view these invoices, so being "unspecified" shouldn't matter.

17 minutes ago, snake said:

But from what I have seen of how WHMCS works, it uses strings rather than ID's for matching rows in tables.

the query itself wouldn't be difficult.

almost certainly I would have tested this 3 years ago when I wrote the above to see what happens when an custom status invoice is paid... that part might have to be retested, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work in any subsequent version.