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Generate invoice(s) early


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I have one client that has requested I generate an invoice for their domains (5) that aren't due until April, so they can submit to their payment service in time to hit the actual expiry date for the domains. The only way I can see to do this is to adjust the due dates on all 5 names, then generate the invoices using the generate invoice button.

 

Is this the proper way, would you say, or is there another method that makes more sense?

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I have the same question / problem. We have several customer's that want thier invoice about 45 days early every year, so that it can get into the payment / billing cycle. However, since many hosting customers are monly, generating invoices that early would have a new customer get his second invoice the day after his first invoice, and THEN the crap would hit the fan. :)

 

So, one of two solutions I guess...

 

1) I would be nice if we could set (or even if the customers could choose) on their personal profile, how far in advance they want to be notified / invoiced

 

2) If we can set this dependent on terms - for example, 7 days early on monthly plans, 14 days early on quarterly, and 45 days early on yearly plans.

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Yes, perhaps letting them totally set their own dates would be chaos, but something like...

 

"Our Billing system will generate an invoice 21 days ahead of time for any renewable items. If you want to be invoiced earlier than that, enter the number of additional days here [15] "

 

Probably not the best wording, but that would be the idea I guess.

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Are they going to be out of town when the invoice is due? I was just wondering whether the Account Pre-funding feature would help in this case.

It's what I was going to suggest to them, but they need the physical invoice to submit. It's a grant funded operation and all payments need to go through channels, and that takes time. I didn't want to change all invoicing to ~30 because that would screw up everyone else.

Probably just manually change thier due dates. It's only a few domains, after all.

Thanks!

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I agree that this needs to be looked at.

 

We have once client that is slow in paying due to the way their billing dept handles things, lol. Ideally we would like to send Invoices to them 3 to 4 weeks earlier than our other clients, on a regular basis.

 

At present there is no easy way to do this.

 

Matt? :-)

 

Cheers,

Paul

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  • WHMCS CEO

Why not change the invoice generation date setting and then just run the invoice generation for that one client? Make the generate in advance, 30, 60, 90 or whatever days in the Automation Settings and then run Invoice Generation for that one client from the Quick Links on their Summary Profile page. Then set it back before the cron runs!

 

Matt

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Hi Matt,

 

Yes, you are correct, that would work.

 

But we have numerous government depts, web designers, sign up that pay us best when we give them a lot more notice. So, ideally an automated approach to this would be more suitable for us. After all, that's why we are moving from a manual system to WHMCS. :)

 

Cheers,

Paul

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Why not change the invoice generation date setting and then just run the invoice generation for that one client? Make the generate in advance, 30, 60, 90 or whatever days in the Automation Settings and then run Invoice Generation for that one client from the Quick Links on their Summary Profile page. Then set it back before the cron runs!

 

That doesn't exist in my version (I'm one behind: 3.4.1), unfortunately. I have:

Login as Client

View/Edit Credit Card Information

Add New Order

Create Invoice <= creates new, blank invoice

Open New Support Ticket

View Transactions History

Manage Credits

Activate as Affiliate

Delete Client

 

Was this added in the last version or is something broken in mine?

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Why not change the invoice generation date setting and then just run the invoice generation for that one client? (...edited...) Then set it back before the cron runs!Matt
Well, for us that would be a bad idea. We had to do LOTS of manual monkeying with WhoisCart and manual monkeying = things forgotten/missed/buggered. :) The problem for us is that this isn't a single client, it's many of our local guys in our town. People that find us on the internet are fine with ordering, PayPal/CCard, processing, etc all with no problem. However, the local customers that are across the street, or our local designers that want the site setup now and will pay when their design customer's pay them, or the government agencies, or the non-profit groups or the minor hockey teams or.... or a whole whack of guys need to pay by cheque, and they'd need to have their next year's invoice at least 45 days in advance to make sure we get the money by the renewal data. For us it would be maybe 50 clients, so manually setting things, generating invoices, and then setting them back would lead to a total mess.

 

Setting everyone all the time to 45 days early doesn't work for the monthly hosting guy's. They'd pay their initial invoice, and then get next month's invoice the day, and then the following month's invoice a week or two later.

 

Probably the simplest solution is to have dates settable individually for each billing frequency. For us, we'd probably want Monthly guys to get notified 7-10 days early - Quarterly guys 14-21 days early & Yearly guys (normally that would be their domain as well) about 45 days early.

 

I really like the invoice, unpaid, 1st, 2nd & 3rd deal you have - but if it could be settable based on the payment cycle frequency, that would be ideal I think. :)

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Probably the simplest solution is to have dates settable individually for each billing frequency. For us, we'd probably want Monthly guys to get notified 7-10 days early - Quarterly guys 14-21 days early & Yearly guys (normally that would be their domain as well) about 45 days early.

 

I really like the invoice, unpaid, 1st, 2nd & 3rd deal you have - but if it could be settable based on the payment cycle frequency, that would be ideal I think. :)

 

What you want are definable client-types where you can define

invoice days, reminder 1st 2nd 3rd etc and then can pick a type for each group of clients :

local/online/cheque/credit-14 etc

then you're not even limited to payment frequency but infinitely tailorable

 

- why not get a quote for it from Matt :D

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Well, this may be a feature of wider apeal than just me and my limited budget. :)

 

You may be right though - this maybe should simply be a setting based on payment type. Now that I think about it, this doesn't matter much if a guy is monthly or quarterly or yearly - it's primarily if he's a 'mail in payment' guy that the yearly notices need to be early.

 

So, perhaps the simplest thing is for version 3.6001 is to have an 'invoice creation offset' for that payment type. When we activate the 'mail in payment' gateway, there could be a '# of days early' in the configuration, and it could be that simple. :)

 

PS - I'm new around here... is there a feature request area that something like this should go in?

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Actually I dont think that's quite correct, as in our case it needs to be customer specific and not just payment type specific. We have customers that pay via a similar method, but a few of them need to be Invoiced earlier than others.

 

Cheers,

Paul

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That may be in some cases, yes. In our case, we only offer Credit Card or PayPal or Mail in Cheque. With those three, pretty much all Credit Card & PayPal folks just need normal notification on the standard time frame - it's really only the mail-in-cheque fellows that need their invoices early. At least for us in our situation.

 

More flexibility would be great, but for a quick fix, it's really just the mail-in-cheque guy's that need more lead time.

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  • 5 months later...

It would also be good to set a due date before the renewal date. Most clients pay their bills on the due date, and if it's not for an automatic payment gateway or for a domain extension with an API, then the domain expires before the payment is processed, even if they actually paid on the duedate.

 

With my previous internal system I set the due date on yearly accounts 14 days before the account actually expired.

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  • 4 years later...

We have exactly the same issue. I would be happy to pay for a solution as we regularly receive irate emails from customers who's domains have expired whil we wait for payment to be registered - exacly because they insist on paying ON due date.

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  • 4 years later...
On 2/7/2008 at 12:45 AM, railto said:

hmm, i would imagine that would be the correct way.

what if the same scenario happened but the client requested to extend the service for 15 days and wants their invoice to be generated after 15 days?

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On 1/22/2018 at 5:39 AM, dsfsfg said:

what if the same scenario happened but the client requested to extend the service for 15 days and wants their invoice to be generated after 15 days?

WHMCS doesn't support weekly, or daily invoicing. You'd need to manually generate that invoice , then offset the new invoice date in their product/service

Looking at this thread though, it's a good 10 years old. Probably want to create your own thread with your own needs  :)

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