Domain Renewal Billing Issue

[brianr]

I've never really been a big fan of how domain renewals work in WHMCS, but I've never really run into a black and white problem either. I'm curious to know how others deal with this.

 

I have several clients who have a multitude of services. Most of these are billed on the same date each month. The invoices usually contain about 10-15 lines on average.

 

My issues with domain renewals are:

 

1. The combination of the warning/renewal emails telling the client to log-in and click renew and the auto-creation of a renewal invoice.

 

2. A paid renewal auto-generated invoice doesn't seem to renew the domain at the registrar. (May be due to the fact I don't want to automate registrar purchase/renewal functions to filter fraudulent orders.)

 

3. There's no order for auto-generated invoices to show that a renewal needs to be done. (Or anything else for that matter, even once paid.)

 

4. Clients can still click "Renew" in the members area even if an invoice was auto-generated already.

 

This actually happened to a client this last week... He has a number of domains that renew in the early days of March. (Why he couldn't register them all the same day - I donno.)

 

His 'big' invoice was auto generated for his monthly (and quarterly as appropriate) services in the end of Feb, 10-days before the due date. Added to the bottom was one of the domains that expires on the due date.

 

The client missed the fact a few dollar item was added to the invoice, and I made a passing note of it.

 

Fast forward and the -7 day, and -1 day renewal warning emails go out - all saying to log in and click "renew". Client does this (at the last second), and generates an order for renewal. Client pays the renewal order/invoice, as well as his other invoices.

 

At this point the client has paid the big invoice that has a renewal on it, and the new order/renewal invoice for the same domain.

 

How do others handle this, and should the system be a bit more robust to prevent this kind of problem?

[chickendippers]

I would like the option to disable auto-renew of domains, so that my customers can only renew their domain manually. However I haven't had any problem with domain renewals not going through automatically.

[bugster]

#2 and #4 in your list has caused me problems as well.

as for #2 I've tried having the registrar setup in the domain pricing and not setup in domain pricing and it didn't auto renew either way

#4 just had a customer do this. So basically it means you have to check every renewal notice and make sure to remove the auto generated invoice which causes confusion for the customer.

 

Anyone have suggestions on how to handle these problems?

[Troy]

The problems can be a little more severe than even what is mentioned so far in this thread. See this for an example of how the current renewal system can cost you money, if you have multi-year registration/renewal configured:

 

http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?t=9019

 

We actually had to stop multi-year registration because of that one.

 

#2 became an issue for us recently when we decided to stop automated domain registrations by setting the registrar to None in domain pricing. (The reason being we're changing backend registrars and want to transfer existing domains as they are renewed, instead of renewing them in place.)

 

I had no idea that automatic renewal invoices would not at least give us some kind of notice to renew the domain, just like a manual renewal creates an order.

 

I can't speak for Matt, but what he has indicated to me when I raised the issue via a ticket is that a future version, perhaps 3.6.1 but I don't recall for sure if that was specified, will create a to-do/task entry when an automatic renewal invoice is paid. I personally feel it should create an order just like a manual renewal, so everything is in one place, but Matt disagrees, since the customer didn't actually "order" anything. (Debatable IMO, as the customer did order a domain name registration with automatic renewals, but that's just my opinion.)