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prorata leap year needs fixing - it's actually a bug

  • nabil shared this idea 8 years ago
  • Payments/Billing
  • 3 Comments


Prorate is broken. For all of you that use prorated invoicing, it
doesn't work properly during a leap year. While an existing customer
probably won't notice a few pennies difference, a brand new one will! If
a new customer selects a billing frequency that goes over Feb 29, a few
pennies are added due to the leap year.

If you advertise an annual price of say £49.99, that is what a new
customer expects to pay, not £50.13. There's an easy fix, exclude new
customers from prorata on the day that they sign up. But no, this is the
advice I was given:

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"Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback, I can advise that
development have considered this in the past and that there are no plans
to change this behaviour at present due to the aforementioned reasons.

However if you wished to add extra notices explaining leap years to your
customers, that is certainly possible with an order form template
customisation. The relevant documentation is located at
http://docs.whmcs.com/Order_Form_Templates"

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Wrong answer - do you want us to lose new customers. I certainly
wouldn't sign up for a service that advertised one price and then
changed it at checkout. Would you? This is very embarrassing and
unprofessional - and there's such an easy fix - simply exclude from
computing prorata on new accounts on the day they sign up.

3 Comments

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Nabil, thanks for the reply. If you feel this is a bug, the feature request system is not the correct avenue to get this resolved. You will have better luck using the Bug Report forum found here: http://forums.whmcs.com/forumdisplay.php?27-Bug-Reports or via our help desk.
I am sorry but this is actually not a feature request, it is a bug! One that makes us all look completely unprofessional.

Except for a whmcs site, I have never, ever come across a site where a price is advertised as one thing - and when clicking to order it it changes to another amount due to a leap year. There is no way to 'solve the issue' from our side - and suggesting that your customers highlight the issue to their customers will simply confuse them, waste marketing inches and make us look unprofessional is simply not an acceptable solution. It is unprofessional of you to even suggest it to us.

This problem arises for a whole year every fourth year. It needs to be fixed. And rather than rewrite the whole prorata part, it would seem that a simple fix would be to simply not have prorata applied to new customers on the day they signed up - exempt them where sign up date = order date. Which is actually what I had assumed was the case to begin with as the day they sign up there is no need for prorata, it is redundant.

Once again, this is not a feature, it is a BUG.
While we understand that leap years can cause some issues with certain clients in certain product and billing configurations, there are ways to solve these issues as the product exists today.

WHMCS continues to work on exciting features such as new order forms and admin functionality that ultimately enhances and improves the product in great ways.

Requests like this may seem like a simple alteration of the product, however modifying core functionalities, such as those that affect Invoice (including the Prorata feature), can have a profound impact on the entire product. When deciding on which areas of the product to improve upon we must balance a number of variables include the potential for positive change, the scope of the potential benefactors, and the magnitude of testing rigor that is encumbered (in perpetuity) to asset appropriate behaviors of the product (in various configuration and environment permutations).

WHMCS is dedicated to delivering new features and additional behaviors that provide the most impact to the highest number of users and as a result to that commitment, WHMCS will not be implementing this change at this time.

We appreciate you bringing this to the attention of the feature request system.