Transactions

From WHMCS Documentation

Applying Payment to an Invoice

If you receive a payment that isn'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 issueing credit to a client.

1. Begin by locating & opening the invoice to apply the payment to using the Search or Billing > Unpaid Invoices list
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 (if applicable) & amount into the fields shown
4. Then click the Add Payment button to complete the process

Note: You can add a partial amount, all of the invoice's balance 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 be automatically added as a credit to the user for use on future invoices.

If you receive a payment which applies to multiple invoices, to enter that 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 a field labelled Invoice ID(s) and in that, you can enter a comma seperated list of all the invoice numbers that this payment should be applied to. Payments will be applied in the order entered until the full amount has been used and any amount left over will be automatically added as a credit to the user for use on future invoices.

Adding a Manual Transaction

To enter external transactions in WHMCS such as when you receive payments not related to a specific client or make expenditures to pay for your servers or other services, you will need to add manual transactions to account for them. This can be done as follows:

1. Begin by going to Billing > View Transaction List
2. Select the Add Transaction tab at the top of the page
3. Then you can choose the client it relates to (if any), date of the payment, gateway used, enter a description, transaction id (if applicable) and the amount
4. Once complete, click the Add Transaction button to complete the process

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.