Automatic Cancellation for Overdue Invoices - Share your Experience

[WHMCS John]

Hi testers!

One of the new features added in WHMCS 8.10 Release Candidate 1 is Automatic Cancellation for Overdue Invoices. Enabling you to automate the process of removing old overdue invoices. During the pre-release testing we want to hear about your experiences with this feature.

Some potential starting points for discussion are:

• What was your experience activating and configuring this feature in Automation Settings?
• Were overdue invoices cancelled as expected?
• Does the Invoice Note contain useful information to help your admins understand why an invoice was cancelled?

In addition to resolving any errors which might occur, understanding any pain points is of particular interest to us. Your input will help us tweak messaging in the product or documentation and publish support articles.

Thanks for your help in the pre-release testing!

[Mark]

Is "Automatic Cancellation for Overdue Invoices" disabled by default? Please say Yes.

[WHMCS John]

Hi @Mark,

Yes this option is Off by default.

[DennisHermannsen]

I'm looking forward to testing this out.

How will it work for domains with a grace/redemption period? Does it take that into account or will it just cancel any overdue invoice after X amount of days no matter what?

[WHMCS John]

Hi @DennisHermannsen 

The documentation describes the exact logic that's applied: https://docs.whmcs.com/Automation_Settings#Enable_Auto_Cancellation

Personally I'd set the Days Overdue setting equal to your Termination Days or Redemption Period settings, whichever is longer.

[DennisHermannsen]

The issue is that TLD X might have 14 days of redemption while TLD Y have 45.
If you set Termination Days to 30, you'd have to set Days Overdue to 45. This means that clients still have the possibility to pay for an invoice for a product that has been terminated.

It would be really great if Auto Cancellation took the Redemption Period into consideration.

[WHMCS John]

Hi @DennisHermannsen,

I appreciate the point you raise, we did highlight the domain question in the feature request a few months ago.

There is good reason for keeping this functionality super simple; every time we've approached this idea over the years we've identified more and more potential carve-outs and exceptions, requiring increasingly complex and potentially opaque logic. Attemting to implement all this would have resulted in a huge scope of work, causing it to be deferred.

Throughout, the feedback we received from users is that the solution should be simple, so that's what we've delivered.

I hope that by making the logic simple to understand, admins can consider whether the feature meets their needs and easilly configure it if so.

[Damo]

Without installing the beta I have a question about. 

• Invoice cancellation does not explicitly trigger additional actions. However, depending on your automation settings, additional automation may occur due to cancelled invoices.

Would this include the ability to send an email notification using a  custom email template?

[WHMCS John]

Hi @Damo,

The InvoiceCancelled hook point is triggered after the invoice is cancelled, that could be used to send a client email.

We've also added a new hook point prior to invoice cancellation; PreInvoiceAutomaticCancellation which can abort the automated cancellation if desired.