[freeside-users] Time of "next bill date"

[Gerald V. Livingston II]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 13:17:24 -0400 Jeremy Davis <jeremy at manageisp.com>
wrote:

Gerald wrote:

> > Now, let's say in October a few accounts have been deleted that would have
> > fallen earlier in the daily run. So, on 10/10/2006 freeside-daily passes
> > this account at 09:06:59 -- once again it gets skipped over, not billed
> > until the following day, and its billing day gets pushed back again, now to
> > the 11th of each month.
> >
> > If the time portion of that field could be defaulted to always be 00:00:01
> > OR if freeside-daily would simply ignore the time portion of that field
> > the problem would be solved.
> >
> >   
> Not that this is the perfect solution but you could have freeside-daily 
> run one day into the future.  Then you can make some adjustments in 
> invoice events to settle the differences.
> 
> Jeremy

I was looking at building a bash wrapper around the freeside-daily cron
job. A little 'date', 'cut', and 'sed' can probably get it done.

Actually, no cut and sed required. Hacked this up while writing this reply
(just uses echo here in the example as a safe test bed). change "user" to a
valid username and make sure cron is running the whole this as UID
freeside. When I set up the self-service server I'll figure out a way to
block signups between 23:45:00 and 00:00:01 for "system maintenance".

(extra line breaks below to keep the email wrapping polite)

#!/bin/bash

# freeside-daily-today-wrapper

# Wrapper for freeside-daily billing to ensure all 

# accounts are billed on the correct anniversary 

# date regardless of what time freeside-daily is run 

# by telling it to run as if the current time is very late 

# in the day so an account with a "Next Billing Date" 

# of "Sept 09, 2006 22:00:00" will not get skipped 

# and billied the NEXT day if freeside-daily is run at 

# "Sept 09, 2006 09:00"

# Run as-is to make sure your version of 'date' 

# spits out the correct format. Make sure the "timezone" 

# variable is getting correctly set. "date" will leave it 

# blank if t can't determine a timezone.

# Using echo prevents freeside-daily from actually running.

# When the output "looks right" edit this file. Remove the "echo". 

# Change "user" to a valid freeside user login name. Put it in 

# /usr/local/bin and "chmod 555 freeside-daily-today-wraper"

# Then set this in your system-wide crontab running as UID 'freeside' 

# instead of running freeside-daily directly

today=`date +"%a, %e %b %y "` timezone=`date +"%Z"`

echo /usr/local/bin/freeside-daily -d \"$today 23:50:00 $timezone\" gerald

#END