Billing - dates change

Hello everyone!

We are currently encountering a pretty serious issue with the dates of the invoices which we can print from the back-end of our shop:

Whenever we re-print invoices / bills a second time they will change the displayed date to the current date or apparently to any random date too (we had at least one case reported by an employee).

This issue has arised together with our upgrade to the business version of hikashop over a month ago and has caused terrible chaos already. We'd be very thankful for any hints about system settings that could be influencing the billing dates as we're quite positive that this is not a bug or error.

Thanks for your reply!

The issue in the picture: The "unchangeable" date in the order (order_created) on the left and the displayed date on the invoice. In this case the date on the invoice equals the date of the manual change of the order status from "open" to "received" ("bestätigt" in German). edit: while the invoice date should always equal the date when the order was created OR at least stay the same date - and should especially NOT change around whenever something happens in the course of the order (e.g. customer cancelles - invoice date changes?!? why?)

I deleted the customizations and checked the date on the bills again - the echo for the date displayed on the invoice depends on the terms $this->element->order_created and $this->element->order_created and apparently since our upgrade to the business version there seems to be an additional IF{} differentiation that sometimes changes the date on the invoice to other dates from the order-history

We could solve the problem by eliminating the IF{} clause, which for now does the trick.

if(!empty($this->element->order_invoice_created)) {
	echo JText::_('DATE').': '.hikashop_getDate($this->element->order_created,'%d %B %Y');
}else{
	echo JText::_('DATE').': '.hikashop_getDate($this->element->order_created,'%d %B %Y');
}  ?>

Hello Nicolas!

Thanks for clarifying. Before Philip's answer I wasn't shure where to look (I'm not exactly a programmer) but I'm starting to understand the problem.

Of course, the dates were not really "random", but we have not been able to see a pattern until Philip pointed out the php-customizations. We are a small company and do most of the work ourselves, but we had help with the set-up and don't know about all the details.

Indeed, some of the "invoices" have been printed before payment and have subsequently been showing the "correct" date for our purposes. I checked and in those cases where customers payed later (e.g. via bank transaction) the dates have been wrong on the re-prints, like you pointed out.

To put matters in simple words: For our needs, the "invoice" needs to show the date of the creation of the order, regardless of any payments, changes in the order status or anything else and should therefore always correspond with the "order created" date.

1) We receive an order
2) We print the delivery note and invoice twice - one for the customer (shipment), one for the books
3) When payment arrives, we send the shipment from our outbox.

Paypal arrives instantly and auto-changes the order status to 'payed', cash payments and bank transactions have to be set manually. In these cases the date of the invoice should also be the order_created date. Does our primitive work-around do the trick?

Thanks guys!

Well - problem solved!

Thanks everyone