Set Invoice recipient

[DTM]

Hi

We have clients set up and under the clients - usually - a number of contacts. One of them is the Billing Contact (Clients > Client > Client Profile tab).

The account owner is only the recipient for the invoices for about half of our clients. For the other half it's someone else. The account owner has no interest in receiving or seeing the invoices and doesn't want the emails.

However it still emails the invoices and payment receipts to the account owner. Setting the billing contact doesn't seem to do anything.

What am I missing.. 🙂

Thanks,
Mark

[brian!]

19 hours ago, DTM said:

What am I missing..

there's a 7-year feature request to disable invoices being sent to the client and only to a billing contact...

https://requests.whmcs.com/topic/send-invoice-related-mail-to-invoice-contact-only-if-exists

i'm aware of a hook previously posted on GitHub, but I haven't tried it recently so don't know if it still works... though it seems very convoluted solution.

[DTM]

Hmm. This means we can't use WHMCS for billing, as it can't send the invoices to the right person, meaning we won't get paid. This is a show-stopper.

One of the reasons we migrated Kayako and QuickBooks to this was to bring the two things together but what we're left with is a ticketing system that's inferior to Kayako's (OK, that's a specialised ticketing system and we can put up with a loss of some functionality, we weren't using the complex features) and a monthly bill of about the same size. I wouldn't have embarked on this path if I'd known that we wouldn't be able to achieve the objective because one really basic, essential feature is missing.

I've migrated everything from QB into this system - but thankfully I didn't cancel QB , as we're going to have to go back to using that and reactivate all the scheduled repeat invoices.

The other problem as mentioned in that thread is the CCing of everything to the account holder. This is already having the effect that we're not getting replies because the emails don't discern between "this is for you to deal with" and "this is a copy of something someone else is dealing with".

I guess I'll now have to remove all the products from WHMCS and with that all the "Store" features in the client portal. I suppose the alternative would be to somehow stop WHMCS emailing the invoices, pull them down as PDFs and email them to the customer billing contacts manually which doesn't compare with QuickBooks' ability to generate and send them automatically (to the right person).

A few things to think about. I suspect we may have to drop WHMCS altogether 😞 but we shall see.

[Kian]

Wait! I think there's a way to stop sending billing & payment emails to the owner of the account. I'll let you know my findings.

[DTM]

I've been playing around with the settings. Using a test account: if I edit "Profile" and for the main contact on the page I turn off the Invoice notifications using the tick box in the list, and save that - then go to Contacts, find the billing contact, and do the opposite - tick the same setting on that page (this is the bit I was missing, assuming that marking the contact as the billing contact would be enough) - and then I generate an order..  the invoice does only go to the billing contact.

It doesn't matter whether you select who is the billing contact on the Profile page - that doesn't do anything. You can leave it blank and the above still works.

Edited November 28, 2020 by DTM