[freeside-users] freeside-daily question

[Ivan Kohler]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 07:57:54PM -0500, Gerald Livingston wrote:
> Freeside 1.5.8 running on Debian Linux

Upgrade.  1.5.8 is four years old and is no longer maintained or 
supported at all.  1.7 is maintenance-only for specific embedded 
customers at this point.  1.9 is recommended.

> I run freeside-daily just after midnight like this from crontab:
> 
> 05 0 * * *  freeside /usr/local/bin/freeside-daily -d 23:59:59 user
> 
> The -d 23:59:59 is because I discovered (long ago) some accounts have a
> billing time other than 00:00:00 (it appears to be from an old import)
> and they were getting missed completely because their billing time
> hadn't passed on the day it was run (at midnight) and on the following
> day it skipped them because they were set to be billed "yesterday".

No, that is incorrect.  freeside-daily will bill everyone with a next 
bill date of now or in the past.  It won't skip people set to be 
re-billed "yesterday" or at any day in the past.  A quick perusal of the 
code shows this seems to be the case back to at least 1.4.

> Now, my first-of-month billing has gotten large enough that it is no
> longer completing before my credit card processor does its daily settle
> so I want to start the billing BEFORE midnight each day and I'm
> wondering how freeside-daily batches/forks the command processes.

Without the -m flag, it doesn't.  With the -m flag, all daily billing is 
run through the job queue.  This can offer a sigificant speedup, 
especially for those cases where freeside-daily spends most of its time 
waiting for responses from the credit card gateway.

Also worth noting is that -d (or the time freeside-daily starts) is used 
for all billing jobs, no matter how long the process takes.

-- 
_ivan