Introduction

Welcome to another part of our WHMCS General Settings tutorial. This tutorial will review another tab from the General Settings, namely, the “Invoices” tab. In this tab, you will get access to settings allowing you to configure the way WHMCS issues invoices for your customers. In addition to that, you can also set up the invoice's behavior, such as late fees, invoice format, and invoice payment options.

Of course, WHMCS has plenty of configuration choices under the General Settings, and we will examine them in the rest of our WHMCS tutorials in the series.

Getting Started

To access the General Settings, please log inside your WHMCS admin area. After you log in, please point your attention to the top right corner. There you will see the wrench icon. Please click on it, and then click on the "System Settings" option from the revealed icons. 

This action will redirect you to the "System Settings" page, where you will see all the available WHMCS settings.

To access the "General Settings," please click on the "General Settings" content box, which will be the first option under the "All Settings" title.

Invoices Tab

To access the "Invoices" tab, please click on the "Invoices" tab on the right side of the "Support" tab. It will contain settings related to the WHMCS invoices and allow you to fine-tune every aspect of your invoices in a way best suited to your needs.

Let's check each option individually and understand what they do.

• Continuous Invoice Generation - Please use this tickbox to enable repeated invoice generation, even if the respective product already has an unpaid/pending invoice. This may be handy if you have many customers using short-term billing cycles and want to pay all their invoices at once. Either way, we recommend keeping this disabled.
• Enable Metric Usage Invoicing - Please use this checkbox to enable Metric Usage Invoicing. Suppose you have configured "Usage Billing" in WHMCS. In that case, this setting will allow your system to generate invoices based on the customer's usage for Disk Space, Bandwidth, Addon Domains, or the number of cPanel accounts added (for Reseller and VPS/Dedicated Servers). Unless you plan on billing customers for their web hosting account usage, we recommend keeping this setting disabled.
• Enable PDF Invoices - Please use this checkbox to attach a PDF version of invoices to the email the customer receives with each order. We recommend keeping this setting enabled, as PDF invoices are pretty handy for some customers, especially if they purchase web hosting on behalf of the company they work for.
• PDF Paper Size - Please use this drop-down menu to select the PDF paper size for the PDF version of the invoice. We recommend keeping the A4 option, as it is a larger paper, allowing you to include more information on the invoice.
• PDF Font Family - Please use the radio button to select the font you would like WHMCS to use for PDF invoices. The default one is Helvetica. However, you can choose a preferred font from the available options or select a custom one using the text field corresponding to this setting.
• Store Client Data Snapshot - Please use this checkbox to enable client data snapshots. This setting will save customers' names, addresses, and custom field data (VAT numbers, for example) when an invoice is generated. The Client Area and PDF invoice views will show the client's information as it was when the invoice was initially created. Changing the client or billing contact will only cause future invoices to change, while the existing invoices will preserve their current addresses. When this is enabled, the system will start fixing the invoice data. Applying this setting will not affect existing invoices.
• Enable Mass Payment - Please use this checkbox to enable "Mass Payment" for outstanding invoices. This option will allow customers to pay all their due invoices with a single transaction from the "My Invoices" section in the Client Area.
• Clients Choose Gateway - Please use this tickbox to enable customers to select a gateway when they pay their invoice. If this option is disabled, the default gateway the customer initially used will be selected.
• Group Similar Line Items - Please use this checkbox to automatically group items using identical lines into the quantity X description format.
• Cancellation Request Handling - Please use this tickbox to enable automatic cancellation request handling. The system will cancel any outstanding invoices once the customer submits a cancellation request. If the canceled product is bundled with other invoices, this functionality will only remove the one associated with it and leave the remaining invoices unpaid.
• Automatic Subscription Management - Please use this checkbox to enable automated subscription management. Here are the conditions under which this functionality will work:

1. The subscription will be canceled only when an admin or the client requests to cancel the respective service.
2. The system will cancel the subscription if an admin sets the order to "Fraud" via the Admin Area or cancels the plan manually.
3. If the system passes, the API call “cancelsub=true”. This API call will either cancel the plan or set it as "Fraud". IMPORTANT: API calls will NOT work for canceling PayPal profiles created before 2009.
4. WHMCS will cancel the PayPal subscription if an admin or the customer submits an upgrade order for the service.

• Enable Proforma Invoicing - Please use this checkbox to enable "Proforma" invoicing. As this setting is quite situational, we won’t cover it here. If you want to learn more, please refer to WHMCS’s official documentation about proforma invoicing.
• Sequential Paid Invoice Numbering - Please use this checkbox to enable "Paid" invoice numbering. When this functionality is enabled, "Paid" invoices will be set apart from "Unpaid" by different numbers. 
• Sequential Invoice Number Format - Please use this text box to define the format in which the Sequential Invoice Number is displayed.
• Next Paid Invoice Number -  Please use this text field to assign a number that will be used to increment each consecutive invoice if sequential invoice numbering is enabled.
• Late Fee Type - Please use this radio button to select whether the late fee is percentage based or a fixed amount.
• Late Fee Amount - Please use this text field to define the exact amount you want customers to pay should they fail to pay their invoice in time. If set to 0, the late fee will be disabled.
• Late Fee Minimum - Please use this text field to define the minimum amount clients need to pay should they fail to pay their invoices in time. For example, if you set this value to $2, and the customer's late fee is $1, the system will select the $2 minimum.
• Accepted Credit Card Types - Please use this content box to select the credit card types your customers may use for their orders. "CTRL + Click" (Windows) or "Command + Click" (Mac) will allow you to choose multiple card types. 
• Issue Number/Start Date - Please use this checkbox to enable a prompt for clients to enter an issue number and start date for their cards.
• Invoice # Incrementation - Please use this text field to select the incremental step you wish WHMCS to use for invoices. For example, if you choose 5, WHMCS will cause the first five invoice numbers to be 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20.
• Invoice Starting # - Please use this text field to define the next invoice's starting number. Please be sure to enter a number greater than that of the last invoice.

Once you have chosen the desired settings on this page, please click on the blue “Save Changes” button located at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, please click the grey “Cancel Changes” button on the right side of it to revert them.

Conclusion

This warps up all the configurations under the WHMCS “Invoices” tab. Hopefully, you found our tutorial helpful and used some of our recommendations within this tab to improve the way WHMCS issues invoices for your clients.

Please follow our next tutorial in line, which will go through the “Credit” tab.  It contains settings related to the way WHMCS handles credits added by customers and how it will allow customers to use these credits.