Revision as of 17:29, 13 September 2021

Applying Payment to an Invoice

If you receive a payment that the system hasn't automatically logged in WHMCS, you will need to manually apply it to the invoice. Alternatively, if the payment is not for any particular invoice, you should follow the steps below for issuing credit to a client.

1. Begin by locating and opening the invoice to apply the payment using the Search or Billing > Unpaid Invoices lists.
2. Next, from the invoice management page, select the Add Payment tab.
3. Enter the details corresponding to the payment, including the date, payment method, transaction ID, and amount.
4. Click the Add Payment button to complete the process.

If you receive a payment that applies to multiple invoices, go to Billing > View Transaction List > Add Transaction. There, you get the same fields as when applying payment to an individual invoice, but, in addition, you also get an Invoice ID(s) field. In that, you can enter a comma-seperated list of all the invoice numbers to apply this payment to. The system will apply payments in the order you enter them until the client has used the full amount. The system will automatically add any amount left over as a credit to the user for use on future invoices.

Adding a Manual Transaction

You will need to enter transactions manually if you receive payment from a client by an offline means such as a check or wire transfer. You may also want to do this to enter external transactions, like expenditures for your servers or other services, into WHMCS. It is important you do this correctly to ensure the figures in your WHMCS system are correct. To do this:

1. Go to Billing > Transactions List.
2. Select the Add Transaction tab at the top of the page.
3. Choose the client it relates to (if any), the date of the payment, and the gateway.
4. Enter a description, transaction ID (if applicable), and the amount.
5. If this is a payment that the client can apply to invoices later (for example, a prefunding or payment on account), select the Add as Credit checkbox, which will automatically create the appropriate credit entry for the user.
6. Click the Add Transaction button to complete the process.

Account Prefunding/Add Funds

There are times when a client might want to deposit money with you in advance. For example, if they are about to place a number of orders, or they are going on holiday. WHMCS allows for this using the Account Prefunding/Credit feature.

For details, see Add Funds

Managing Credit

Credit allows customers to have a prepaid balance on their account which can be useful for allowing customers to pay in advance and dealing with overpayments.

For more help and information, refer to Credit/Prefunding

Searching Transactions & Handling Reversals

If you have had a check bounce, or you've received a chargeback or dispute for a transaction you already applied, it is likely that the actions that payment should trigger, such as renewal of a product, domain registration, or renewal, have already happened and you can't reverse them. You will need to deduct the amount from your income and issue the client a new invoice to repay. For example, below are the steps for a transaction that a client paid in 2CheckOut with the transaction ID "6A5245278HM":

1. Begin by going to Billing > Transactions List. This will show you a list of all the transactions in your WHMCS system.
2. Next, click the Search/Filter tab at the top. The various available filtering options will appear.
3. This transaction used 2CheckOut, so select 2CheckOut in the Gateway Dropdown List.
4. Enter this in the Transaction ID field (see below).
5. Click submit. Any matching transactions will display. From here, we can see the transaction date, the client who made it, and the invoice they were paying.
6. Click the invoice for that transaction and use the Refund tab to apply a "Record Only" refund to deduct the paid amount from your income and show that invoice as unpaid.
7. Decide what to do with the items on the invoice. For example, if it's a product, you might want to go and suspend that product from the clients profile to prevent any further use. If it's a domain, contact the registrar and ask whether a cancellation is possible.
8. After taking care of the products, you may want to create a new manual invoice for repayment (for example, if the dispute is a mistake or the client has contacted you) so you can do that by manually creating a custom invoice. This can also apply any fees or surcharges you may have incurred for the disputed payment. You should not attempt to reinvoice the original items for repayment as that could lead to double incrementing of due dates, and double renewal actions on products and services.

The Gateway Logs

If WHMCS isn't automatically handle transactions, take a look at the transaction log. You can view the transaction log by going to Billing > Gateway Log.

If a WHMCS-integrated payment gateway has made a payment return, details of the return will appear here. Each return has three possible outcomes: Successful, Invalid or Error.

• A successful payment return occurs when WHMCS automatically identifies and restores the payment and performs any required actions.
• An invalid return occurs when WHMCS doesn't expect the data that returns from the gateway (for example, the Invoice ID is wrong or the payment value doesn't match).
• An error return occurs if the data from the payment gateway contains errors or the system can't verify it.

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