Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : PHP Question.

[NickDev]

I am making some billing software and im stuck on this..

when the user orders i need to put the date they order then in 30 days or 365 days i need to be able to tell they need to pay again any ideas.? thanks

[mpope]

seems like more of a logic question than a php question.

What I would do is set each account to have a renew date, and then run a script that checks renew dates every day or month or whatever time interval you want. You can set the script up in cron so you won't have to run it manually!

[worldhive]

I too am working on billing software and have had the worst time doing exactly what you describe. I ended up using builtin SQL functions for time-shifting, but I played around with just adding 30 days (in seconds) to the unix timestamp. The problem is, I wanted to use calendar months, not 30 day months.

I've since put the project on hold until I can justify it with more customers. Now I'm just tracking with paper invoices and reports from 2CO.

--Paul

[nainil]

paste the code in here. We will try to figure out the solution
How do u expect us to know what code you have written?

[worldhive]

Here it is... sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

PHP Code:

if ($invoice['cycle']== 'monthly'){ 
            $end_timestamp= mktime(0,0,0,$time_parts[2]+01,$time_parts[3],$time_parts[1]);
            $period = 1;
} 


This is time_parts:

PHP Code:

$begin_period = $invoice['paidthru'];
        $time_parts   = explode("-",$begin_period); 


I test for each billing cycle and add the appropriate time.

Any ideas? My system is rather slick and other than the issue of not tracking time well (which admittedly is a big issue)... right now however, you can correct its guesses about when to bill next via a textbox. I'd like to remove this bug to actually make it functional

[pphillips]

I designed our AC4 software that manages billing, instant activation of services, trouble ticket system, etc.

The billing system works basically like this. As a note, this may not be the best way of doing this, but it has worked perfectly since October when we released the software.

When the customer signs up, a "start date" and "term" is logged in the database. Every day cron runs a PHP script that calculates the number of days left until everyones term renews. If the term renews in say 30 days, then it's time to create an invoice. Vague, I know, but those are the basics and it works well for us. Of course, this method requires that cron doesn't "stop working" for a day or invoices may be forgotten about unless you implement some failsafes and double checks.