General question in regard to invoicing

Hi folks,

I noticed today, that issued invoices are less static than I was expecting. I’m not really into accounting but it’s kind of strange to me. Shouldn’t changes to issued invoices be prevented? Is an invoice not a legal document?

Currently invoices are rather dynamic, e.g. I can easily change the amounts by adjusting the fee setup. Is this intentional?

I like flexibility as long as the invoice in pending but once it is issued, shouldn’t the content be freezed?

Currently, almost all content of the invoice remains changeable, name of invoicee, form group, status, schedule name and even as mentioned above the amounts.

Personally I think, that an issued invoice should be static without exception.

What is your opinion on this?

Kind regards,
Roman

Roman,

Yes, the aim of the system is to make the invoices static for all the reasons you mention. The behaviour you are seeing is not what we designed, and not what we are seeing here: once an invoice is issued, it is disconnected from the fee used to create it, and so changing the fee has no impact on the invoice. Can you test again and make sure you are not seeing this behaviour?

Thanks,

Ross

Hi Ross,

The behavior is still odd over here. However, it may be related to my Wamp setup, maybe some form of caching issue?

I’m testing on v12. Should I rather test v14?

Can you please compare the printouts for invoice and reminders as well? The suggested procedure is:

  1. Create an issued invoice
  2. Check printout of invoice
  3. Change the amount of fees
  4. Compare printout of new invoice with 2)
  5. Create a reminder
  6. Compare printout reminder with 2)

Is everything consistent?

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,
Roman

Hi Ross,

Can you please add the following steps:

  1. Change the amount of fees again
  2. Do a payment
  3. Compare printout receipt with 2) and 6)

Is still everything ok?

Kind regards,
Roman

Hi Ross,

I had a closer look at my invoice issue. In my setup I could modify the fees of issued invoices easily through changes in the fee setup.

The issue is in function invoiceContents of moduleFunctions.php. For unknown reasons, $preview is always true.

Consequently the fees are always taken from gibbonFinanceFee and never from gibbonFinanceInvoiceFee.

Again, I’m still using v12.

Could this be a php-Issue of my setup?

Kind regards,
Roman

Roman,

I would advise upgrading to v13, to see if this resolves the issue. If you don’t want to upgrade you could always set up a testing install and try it out there. If that does not work, then let us know and we can dig in deeper on our end.

Thanks,

Ross

Hi Ross,

I did 2 new installations, Gibbon v12 and v13. On both versions, the billing module works just fine.

It seems that this issue is not Gibbon related, but has rather to do with my local installation under Wamp.

Thanks for your advice and helping me to narrow things down!

Kind regards,
Roman

Hi Ross,

I’m sorry for the post above. I should have compared the prints, which I didn’t.

The bug seems real and occurs in v12 and v13.

You should be able to reproduce the bug with the steps mentioned above.

Please let me know, how things are going.

Kind regards,
Roman

Roman,

Sorry for the lack of response to this post! Things have been very busy the last two weeks. This is on my list of things to do in the coming days, and will do my best to get around to it.

Ross

Hi Ross,

You and Sandra weren’t available to answer posts in the forum. I was suspecting something of higher priority was taking your time.

Pleased to have you back and well done fixing those security issues!

Kind regards,
Roman

Roman,

Thanks for your patience and clear instructions. In the end I was able to recreate the bug (and you were correct, it was a bug!), and I believe it has now been fixed in the v14 dev branch. If you take the changes highlighted in the commit below, and replicate to your v13 code, you should find it works as we discussed above:

https://github.com/GibbonEdu/core/commit/a4519835143a73d54b579026f24aebfaa644a6e7

Thanks, and good luck! Let us know what you find.

Ross

Hi Ross,

What would I do without you???

I was able to fix my v12 Gibbon and printouts look good now!

Thanks a lot!

Kind regards,
Roman