Revision as of 17:51, 12 March 2010

Adding a Manual Transaction

To include external transactions in WHMCS such as when you pay for your servers or other services, you will need to add manual transactions. This can be done as follows:

1. Go to Billing > View Transaction List
2. Click the Add tab at the top of the page
3. The Add Transaction form will be displayed as shown below
4. From here you can choose the client it relates to (if any), date it was made, gateway used, enter a description, transaction id and the amount
5. Once complete, click the Add Transaction button to add the transaction to the system
6. You can also add transactions directly from inside a clients profile or by marking an invoice paid from the invoice management screen.

Applying Payment to an Invoice

If you receive a payment that isn't automatically logged in WHMCS, rather than adding a manual transaction as above, you can apply it straight to the invoice it is for. If one doesn't exist, you should first generate an invoice and then apply the transaction in that way. To apply payment to an invoice manually:

1. Locate the invoice in the admin area
2. Once on the invoice management screen for the invoice you want to mark paid, click the Add Payment tab
3. Now enter all the details about the payment into the fields shown such as the gateway used, date, transaction ID and amount.
4. You can pay part or all of the invoice or even apply more than the amount due on the invoice. If you apply a payment to an invoice which is larger than the amount due then any excess will automatically be added as credit to the user for use on future invoices.
5. Once all the fields are filled out, click the Add Payment button to add it

Managing Credit

You may want to add credit to a client if they overpay one month or if you have some downtime which you want to provide credit for. With WHMCS, you can give the client a credit balance and when their next invoice is generated, this credit will be automatically applied to it. If the credit is enough to cover the entire invoice, the invoice is automatically marked paid. Otherwise, the total amount due is just decreased by the required amount.

Issuing Credit to a Client

See Adding a Manual Transaction above for if you are adding a payment that doesn't relate to any specific invoice and want to add it to the users credit balance so it can be used to pay invoices.

Alternatively, to add a credit without any payment, you would follow the steps below:

1. Begin by going to the Clients Summary page for the client you wish to add Credit to
2. Next click the Manage Credits link to open the window
3. In the popup window that is displayed, click the Add Credit button
4. Enter a description for the credit for your records and the amount of credit to add and click Save Changes
5. The credit will be added to the clients balance and credit entry shown on the credits list

Applying Credit to an Invoice

If raising a new invoice or wanting to pay an existing one with credit from the users available balance, then this is how to do it:

1. Begin by locating the invoice with a search or from the invoices list
2. Once viewing the invoice, select the Credit tab
3. In the Add Credit to Invoice section, enter the amount of credit you wish to transfer from the client's account credit balance to this invoice
4. Click Add to complete the process

Clients also have this ability when viewing an invoice in the client area if they have a positive credit balance.

Automatic Credit

A credit is added to the users account automatically when an invoice is overpaid. A common cause of this is when the client sets up more than 1 PayPal Subscription. This will appear in the log as "Credit for Overpayment of Invoice #xxxx"

Reviewing Credit Logs

If you want to see why a client has been given credit, you need to click the Manage Credit link on the Client Summary page. You will then see a list of credit log entries for the selected client. You have the option to delete entries if you wish and they will then be deducted from the credit balance.

Manual Adjustment

If you don't want to log the adding of credit to a client or just want to make an adjustment to the credit balance of a user, simply go to their Clients Profile. From there, you can edit the Credit Balance field directly and save.

Finding a Transaction

Say for example you get notified a month after a transaction that it has been subject to a chargeback or that it was fraudulently made. You need to locate that transaction and what it was for. In the example below, we will be looking for a transaction made by 2CheckOut with the transaction ID "6A5245278HM".

1. Begin by going to Transactions > View Transactions List.
2. This will show you a list of all the transactions made through the WHMCS system
3. Next, click the Filter tab at the top - the various filtering options available will appear
4. We know this transaction was made using 2CheckOut so we select 2CheckOut in the Gateway Dropdown List
5. We also know the transaction ID so we enter this in the Transaction ID field as shown below
6. Once you have completed selecting filter options, click Filter
7. Any matching transactions will be displayed.
8. From here we can see the transaction date, client who made it and the invoice they were paying
9. You can therefore take the appropriate action in suspending the users account, removing the transaction and marking the invoice Cancelled

The Gateway Logs

If transactions aren't being automatically handled by WHMCS then it is often useful to take a look at the transaction log. The transactions log can be viewed by going to Transactions > Gateway Log.

If a payment return has been made by a payment gateway integrated with WHMCS then details of the return will be listed here. Each return has three possible outcomes - Successful, Invalid or Error.

• A successful payment return occurs when the payment is identified and recorded by WHMCS automatically and any required actions are performed.
• An invalid return occurs when the data returned from the gateway is not expected by WHMCS - for example the Invoice ID is wrong or the payment value doesn't match
• Finally, an error return occurs if the data sent from the payment gateway contains errors or cannot be verified

Invalid returns will occur from time to time when the data received is not fully valid and are usually only random one offs. If you start getting a lot of transactions coming back as invalid or as errors then you might want to contact us so we can check it out.