You can extend customers if they are paying late.
> No, the problem is definitely in the lack of this feature, REGARDLESS of
> whether you'll carry a customer 30 or 60 days. Scenario:
>
> Joe User has no credit card. He signs up with you, using Emerald 2.2, on
> 2/18, and pre-pays that first month. You IMMMEDIATELY create and invoice
> for 2/18 to 3/18, and mark it paid. You run billing on Mondays, and for
> pre-payments, you go 30 days in advance. So on Monday, 2/24, you do a
> batch run that creates his NEXT invoice, for 3/18 to 4/18, which is DUE on
> 3/18. This user habitually pays at the last minute, so you can EXPECT him
> to be knocking on your door the morning of March 17th with a check in
> hand.... and NOT A MOMENT BEFORE THAT. So on Monday, 3/17, you run a
> billing batch, and it doesn't create his invoice -- he hasn't paid the last
> one yet! He pays on Tuesday, and you mark it thusly. He paid ON TIME,
> and there should be no problem, right? WRONG! Next time you do a billing
> run, Monday, March 24th, it will STILL not generate an invoice for him!
> Yes, he paid his last one, but when you tell it on the 24th of March to
> generate invoices from that day through April 24th, it will SKIP HIM. Bad
> karma.
When you invoice for the next cycle, it will generate an invoice
for the prior customers who just paid. You may be hitting a month
boundary. For example, if the date was 2/28-3/28 and he paid late,
his new expire would be 3/28. If you don't also bill for 3/30,
then you'll miss those previous expires. This is something we are
working on for 2.5.
> Fine enough.... I don't want to carry someone FOREVER, but I would like to
> be a bit more generous than just cutting someone off at zero hour,
> especially when customers tend to wait until they ARE cut off to pay the bill!
There is a funny thing about users, though. Many sites Emerald goes
into complain about this and have a heavy adjustment period. But after
a couple of months the users realize if they don't pay on time, they
don't play. You can give them a permanent extend of say five days,
so that even if they pay a day late their account still works. But
you should be able to find a happy medium with your customers w/out
having to loose a lot of "write offs".
-- Dale E. Reed Jr. (daler@iea-software.com)_________________________________________________________________ IEA Software, Inc. | RadiusNT, Emerald, and NT FAQs Internet Solutions for Today | http://www.iea-software.com