Get better understanding of billing module

Administration
1

Hi Ross

As you may have noticed in the posts of the past days, I find it a bit difficult to get started with this module. I wasn’t able to figure out why the module in my setup is rather unstable and odd behaving.

What is your general opinion of this module? Is it stable and working well or rather in a pre-stable state needing more work to use it productively.

Can you please shed some light on how reminders work? When is a reminder issued? In my setup, I issue an invoice and the next day I find 3 additional reminder links, which is rather odd.

Table gibbonFinanceInvoice has the field “key”. What’s the purpose? Is it related to online payments?

What is the purpose of table gibbonFinanceInvoiceeUpdate? I find it empty in my setup.

How best can the billing module work with external accounting software? Is there a way that I can create daily or weekly transaction summaries of payments and refunds? This could then be used to reconcile accounts, right?

Table gibbonPayments contains all payments done. I think, something similar needs to be done for refunds or can this be added to this table as well?

Thanks in advance to find time for my questions.

Kind regards,
Roman

2

Roman,

We have been using it for 2 years, and it has proven reliable and stable. I am not sure why you are seeing the behaviour that you are, and have not been able to recreate any of the issues you are having.

In terms of reminders, I have actually found a bug preventing reminder emails from being sent, which is fixed in the following commit to the v14. You can copy the changes seen in the commit to v13, and it should work fine:

https://github.com/GibbonEdu/core/commit/4b40e6eebffc9f168d55456eebdab9f7668aa052

Reminders can be sent by editing an Issued - Overdue receipt, selecting the recipients under the Email Reminder section at the bottom of the page, and then pressing the Submit button. Reminder 1 is available in the print view before you send the first reminder email. Once you send Reminder 1, Reminder 2 becomes available in the print view, and the same for Reminder 3. That is the intended behaviour, and what we are seeing on our end when we test it out.

The field key in the table gibbonFinanceInvoice allows for payment of invoices without logging in, which makes credit card payment easier, based on a link containing the key being sent in an email.

gibbonFinanceInvoiceeUpdate is populated with requests to update Finance information from the Data Updater module.

In terms of integrating with external solutions, we export invoices to a couple of different systems and then do all the management there. You can export invoice details in bulk in the Manage Invoices page.

In terms of refunds, these are only issued by the finance module, and so are only recorded in the gibbonFinanceInvoice table. gibbonPayments is used for payments from Finance and other areas (such as Application Form), and so currently does not include refunds. This is something I will have to spend some time thinking about.

In future, please try and break these questions into separate posts, as it makes them more managable to answer and to search.

Thanks,

Ross

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PS, also, each time your view a reminder in Print preview, it generates the next level of reminder for viewing (and potential sending).

4

Hi Ross,
I hope you are fine.

This

In terms of integrating with external solutions, we export invoices to a couple of different systems and then do all the management there. You can export invoice details in bulk in the Manage Invoices page.

is not working as expected.
Invoice details are not exported, only the header and totals, but no detail lines.

I’ve recently posted a question on this topic, but I thought it would be a good idea to clarify it here in case anyone else reads it.
Your thoughts on the subject will be very welcome.

Thank you
Regards
Ricardo