WHMCS CEO Matt Posted February 27, 2009 WHMCS CEO Share Posted February 27, 2009 WHMCS February Newsletter Welcome to the February edition of the WHMCS Newsletter. This newsletter is designed to keep you up to date on news & developments with your favourite billing software! Version 4 Status Update As many of you will know, we’ve been hard at work on Version 4 for the past 3 months and we’re all very excited about it here! Alpha testing began last week in preparation for a beta testing period starting at the beginning of March. It will be a closed beta test so that we can ensure thorough and detailed testing to capture as many issues as possible before a public release. We aren’t setting any finite timeframe on how long the beta period will last but we’re working towards a tentative release date of early April. In our November Newsletter, we revealed version 4 will introduce 2 key and much requested new features: Multi-Currency Support Header/Footer Templates and CSS Control for the admin area But of course that’s not all we’ve spent our time on! We’ll be taking a look at 2 more exciting new features later in this newsletter. Billable Items (Coming Soon!) We receive many requests through our forums daily, far more than we could ever implement. However, having received your ideas, and after prioritization, we then try and come up with the best solution to address all of those demands as collectively as possible. A great example of this is a feature we’re calling billable items, which is designed to address all the requests relating to: additional item billing one off item billing instalment based billing time based billing and custom recurring cycles How you might ask? Well here's some more explanation. In Version 4, you will be able to create custom billable item entries for clients. Each item will have a description and amount, and the key part is the invoice action you choose. There are 5 different actions to choose from and they are: Don’t invoice for now Invoice on Next Cron Run Add to User’s Next Invoice Invoice as Normal on X Date Recur Every X Days/Weeks/Months/Years for Y Times starting Z So the possibilities here are that you can add work as you do it without invoicing (option 1) and then bill all the items together when you’re finished by changing to (option 2). Or you can add items during the month which are invoiced at the end of the month with the user’s regular recurring invoice for their other products & services (option 3). Or you can add an item which will bill on a certain date in the future as a one off item (option 4). Or you can setup a recurring item that will for example bill $5 every 2 weeks starting 4 weeks from now and stop after 8 invoices (option 5). And you'll be able to create billable item entries when replying to tickets - a quick and easy way to bill for any costs incurred while providing support. It really is very flexible giving endless possibilities. Invoice Refunds (Coming Soon!) A few months ago, we implemented automated refunding to some of the merchant gateways in WHMCS and that proved to be very popular. And so in version 4, we’ve expanded on this. From any invoice, you will now be able to apply a refund entry quickly and easily by simply entering the amount – be it a partial amount of the total paid or the full value of the transaction. If supported by the gateway module, you can then have WHMCS actually perform the refund for you without ever needing to login and locate the original transaction at your gateway. Existing modules with refund functionality include Authorize.net, BluePay & Quantum Gateway. And new to V4, PayPal one time & subscription payments will also be refundable right from within the admin area. On the same note, 2 new invoice statuses have been added – namely ‘Refunded’ and ‘Collections’. An invoice will go into Refunded status when the full amount paid on that invoice is refunded and Collections will be a status you can set for your unpaid invoices that are looking unlikely to be paid. Support Notice To finish, just a quick note about requesting support. When opening a ticket, if emailing, please ensure you email from your registered email address or include your WHMCS admin url & login details to avoid delays while we reply asking for your details to verify support eligibility. Your help in this matter would be appreciated. Well, that’s it for now. I hope you are all having good start to 2009 despite the current economic gloom and I look forward to writing to you again when Version 4 is ready to go out live. Thanks for your time and as always, we thank you for your continued loyalty and support. Best Regards, Matt & The Rest of the WHMCS Team WHMCS Ltd http://www.whmcs.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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