Italian invoicing system

[Sophia16]

Hello everyone!
I was looking forward to the implementation of WHMCS, however my administrative department posed a fair and necessary question: is there an integration (or module) that supports the italian invoicing system? 

The Revenue Agency is the authority responsible for the electronic invoicing procedure.

All invoices that economic operators resident or established in Italy issue to Italian government departments must be in electronic form and digitally signed.

Non-Italian economic operators can issue invoices in paper or electronic form.

All electronic invoices must be sent to the Exchange System (SdI in Italian), which provides the address to the receiving government department. The exchange system is managed by the Revenue Agency and all information is available on the website https://www.fatturapa.gov.it

 

[Sophia16]

4 minutes ago, brian! said:

I think your only option will be Billing Extension

unfortunately we tried contacting the company several timen but they haven't answered a single request for contact.. 

[Kian]

On 6/3/2021 at 4:14 PM, evcz said:

if BX will stop being maintained could it be released as source code so a collective effort of sponsored developers can keep it maintained while Leap is completed?

That's the plan. The day I get rid of WHMCS and stop supporting all the nonsense I'll open source that. The only two problems are:

• I need to find a way to ensure that some unethical competitors don't steal the code for scammy stuff or to damage me. I have already experienced it multiple times for things ranging from SEO to my own blog and code I posted for free on Github. Shameless people. They stole my stuff, tried to take me down on Google and few weeks ago they even had the nerve to ask me to link to their website with rel="follow" so that I can pass my SEO juice to them 🤯 It's like the man who stole your car comes back to ask if you can pay for the annual vehicle inspection
• I'm not proud of my code in BX. The code is stupidly convoluted but that's not my fault. This is what happens when you work with the many bugs and silly things of WHMCS. It's like trying to tune an F1 car for Monaco GP and find out that it will be driven in a rally competition followed by drag race and moto GP 🤦‍♂️ The module is a cluster**** of super-long if() and hacks needed to prevent WHMCS from doing stupid things. I don't see how someone can understand/change it. I have troubles myself and every update of WHMCS forces you to play the russian roulette 😨🔫

On 6/3/2021 at 4:14 PM, evcz said:

a short term work around alternative while still using WHMCS is exporting on daily basis whmcs data and parse it with "legacy" on premise tools (like teamsystem csv format) and have those tools take care of sending data to SDI

I don't think so. How can you do that when WHMCS purposely issues invoices that make absolutely no sense? I mean, it even asks customers to pay wrong amounts. Of course you can find ways to fix such problems externally but the thing is that there will be a disrepancy between what you're recording and the reality. Fines and troubles are just around the corner.

[brian!]

I think your only option will be Billing Extension

[brian!]

22 hours ago, Sophia16 said:

unfortunately we tried contacting the company several timen but they haven't answered a single request for contact.. 

sadly, that's a tale i've heard many times about him. 😞

you could try sending a PM to Kian as that's his product, but it's worth reading his post below....

https://github.com/Katamaze/WHMCS-Action-Hook-Factory/blob/master/hooks/InactiveIsTheNewActive.php

Quote

In the middle of the COVID-19 crisis WHMCS increased prices up to 3154%
Some companies will start paying 15.599 $ per year instead of 479 $

I stopped supporting WHMCS a long time ago due to the following reasons:

https://katamaze.com/blog/41/whmcs-cons

I'm no longer in the mood to help this company with my money, efforts and skills
I stopped wasting my time with their untested releases full of bugs and features no one asked for
I also stopped adding new features to my modules and I no longer participate to whmcs.community (note: he still does, but just less so!)

Anyway I moved to another market leaving WHMCS so I have no time to dedicate to this project

all that said, I still think it's your only option for WHMCS - short of getting something similar written, perhaps less bloated, from scratch - and that would not be cheap.... or you find an alternate to WHMCS that could support Italian invoicing (off the top of my head, i'm not aware of one).

[Kian]

On 5/31/2021 at 12:54 PM, Sophia16 said:

unfortunately we tried contacting the company several timen but they haven't answered a single request for contact.. 

You can find all information about electronic invoicing & WHMCS here.

I understand that it's a 10000-words article but there's everything you need to know. There are no alternatives and will never be since the profit / complexity ratio is hugely unbalanced. As brian said, I'm no longer in the mood to work this hard on this platform. I'm focusing on a small group of customers and working on new projects not connected to WHMCS.

If you have any question, probably this is the best place to ask 😅

[evcz]

Billing Extension is an amazing addon for WHMCS to make it complaint with fattura elettronica

I think there are multiple hosts temporary stuck with WHMCS and willing to jump ship as soon as Leap or something else open source that can be trusted to be supported on long term will be available.

@Kian if BX will stop being maintained could it be released as source code so a collective effort of sponsored developers can keep it maintained while Leap is completed?

a short term work around alternative while still using WHMCS is exporting on daily basis whmcs data and parse it with "legacy" on premise tools (like teamsystem csv format) and have those tools take care of sending data to SDI

[evcz]

On 6/6/2021 at 3:26 PM, Kian said:

That's the plan. The day I get rid of WHMCS and stop supporting all the nonsense I'll open source that. The only two problems are:

• I need to find a way to ensure that some unethical competitors don't steal the code for scammy stuff or to damage me. I have already experienced it multiple times for things ranging from SEO to my own blog and code I posted for free on Github. Shameless people. They stole my stuff, tried to take me down on Google and few weeks ago they even had the nerve to ask me to link to their website with rel="follow" so that I can pass my SEO juice to them 🤯 It's like the man who stole your car comes back to ask if you can pay for the annual vehicle inspection
• I'm not proud of my code in BX. The code is stupidly convoluted but that's not my fault. This is what happens when you work with the many bugs and silly things of WHMCS. It's like trying to tune an F1 car for Monaco GP and find out that it will be driven in a rally competition followed by drag race and moto GP 🤦‍♂️ The module is a cluster**** of super-long if() and hacks needed to prevent WHMCS from doing stupid things. I don't see how someone can understand/change it. I have troubles myself and every update of WHMCS forces you to play the russian roulette 😨🔫

 

I completely understand your points here

I'm also very sorry of what you had to go thru as for customers bad behaviour and "weird" requests in addition to WHMCS built-in non sense "features".

Knowing that BX is still supported and being so hopefully till the point when we will have a way to jump to Leap or anything else would be a big relief and should be fine for the original poster here @Sophia16

Having a vision of an alternative in future would make the need of open sourcing BX not pressing.
If BX support get dropped when there's an existing migration path people can just jump and forget about BX/WHMCS

With Billing Extension you have coded an amazing product that fixes WHMCS and make it work smoothly along with "fattura elettronica".

On our side we've tried to commit supporting BX even more by subscribing to a 360plan but apparently we picked the wrong time or got late to the party.

If there's anything we can do as a community to help making BX survive let us know, I'll happily signup again to a 360 support plan as well.

On 6/6/2021 at 3:26 PM, Kian said:

I don't think so. How can you do that when WHMCS purposely issues invoices that make absolutely no sense? I mean, it even asks customers to pay wrong amounts. Of course you can find ways to fix such problems externally but the thing is that there will be a disrepancy between what you're recording and the reality. Fines and troubles are just around the corner.

I think BX does great things and cannot be easily replaced.

My referring to exporting raw data from WHMCS and then processing/fixing it externally was purely on a long term view and only specifically related to the Italian framework ... with "fattura elettronica" included.

That posture would make it so whmcs upgrades will break less things as most of processing and fixing (yeah, even fixing wrong VAT calculations) can be done outside (on italian framework what make sense is the fattura elettronica, every other paper is worthless, so as long as the XML is "fixed" we can ignore what whmcs produces and use it just a payment and product management)
OFC I know this is a too optimistic view and also a very complicated road to take, god bless BX 😄

Thank you for your hard work, commitment and especially for the BX module, keep up the good work, I'm sure you have a great amount of good people and happy customers that will follow you

Edited June 7, 2021 by evcz

[fmoretto]

On 6/1/2021 at 8:19 PM, Kian said:

You can find all information about electronic invoicing & WHMCS here.

I understand that it's a 10000-words article but there's everything you need to know. There are no alternatives and will never be since the profit / complexity ratio is hugely unbalanced. As brian said, I'm no longer in the mood to work this hard on this platform. I'm focusing on a small group of customers and working on new projects not connected to WHMCS.

If you have any question, probably this is the best place to ask 😅

Unfortunately Davide is a "primula rossa" as we say in Italy... Toc Toc, Davide, can you reply to one of my several messages/tickets/emails? Do you remember I'm a paid customer?

Francesco

[Kian]

On 6/17/2021 at 11:57 AM, fmoretto said:

Do you remember I'm a paid customer?

Of course but I'm done working not less than 12 hours / day (many times including weekends and holidays) due to WHMCS staff ruining everything I fix on every update. Not to mention the introduction of new bugged features that no one asked for and the nonsensical price increase. There's no profit in working this hard on such a messy and poorly maintained platform. As if it wasn't enough many providers are leaving so profits are lower than ever.

Here is the thing. I can't read and reply to all those tickets not even working 24 hours per day without sleeping. There are only two options:

• Increase modules' price by 200% so that I can hire more people to provide decent support
• Keep prices low. Support is terrible (or non-existent) but at least anyone can use mission-critical features like electronic invocing counting on an extensive documentation. If you have problems you can use Lab and wait & pray like we all do for WHMCS feature requests. Providers that need something more reliable can purchase dedicated support with service level agreement

As you can imagine I picked the second option and the reason is pretty simple. Last year I increased prices just by 56%. It was my first and only price increase in 13 years. No one liked it. I used that money to hire a developer to add new features and reply to tickets but in essence most customers told me the following:

• I'm a provider and can I solve problems by myself. I don't need better support
• I bought your module for feature X. I don't care about new features
• We work in a low profit margin industry so price is the most important thing
• Your module can't cost me more than WHMCS (well, right now WHMCS can cost you up to 16.000$ per year)

Unlike WHMCS, I listened to feedbacks 👍 If you have a better plan to get more funds without increasing pricing I'm all ears.

[evcz]

21 minutes ago, Kian said:

Providers that need something more reliable can purchase dedicated support with service level agreement

personally I've tried to subscribe to the 360° support in order to fund the development

but couldn't find anyway to submit 360° support requests, only free ones so stopped renewing after the first 2 months.

 

I'll happily join again the "360° support" if there's a way to find out how to activate if after order and would stay subscribed there knowing it would help keeping module development in general on top of being able to have some feedback in case an emergency situation come up one day

I'd consider that as some sort of "insurance" to protect against whmcs breaking things 😄

Edited July 12, 2021 by evcz