This week’s HostBill update brings a powerful set of enhancements. From smarter invoice handling that prevents duplicate payments, to new options for managing contact language preferences and file notifications, to deeper control over product form defaults and pricing logic – here’s what’s new!

New invoice status: Processing

In today’s release we’re introducing a powerful update to HostBill’s billing engine: a brand-new invoice status – “Processing”, designed to prevent duplicate payments and improve how HostBill handles payment methods with delayed confirmation. This change comes with a set of improvements to the billing flow, especially for payment methods like bank transfers(e.g. Stripe BACS or ACSS), which can take several days to confirm.

The new “Processing” invoice state reflects that a payment has been initiated, but not yet confirmed by the payment gateway. Once an invoice enters the Processing status:

• It becomes temporarily locked from accepting other payment attempts.
• Late payment reminders and overdue notices are paused.
• HostBill waits for the gateway to confirm the payment or timeout the processing period.

At launch, this feature is automatically supported for selected payment gateways, including Stripe.com with BACSand ACSS methods.

Previously, when clients used bank transfers or other payment methods with delayed confirmationthey would often pay an invoice, only to see it remain marked as Unpaid in HostBill for several days. Unsure whether the payment went through, many assumed something went wrong and proceeded to pay again using a different method, like a credit card. This often resulted in the invoice being paid twice, creating confusion for the customer and extra work for administrators to resolve the duplicate payments. With the new “Processing” status, HostBill prevents this scenario by temporarily locking the invoice from further payment attempts during the expected confirmation period—effectively eliminating this common and frustrating issue

If the invoice remains in “Processing” and the gateway fails to confirm the payment within the expected timeframe, the invoice will automatically revert to Unpaid status and trigger a new email notification Invoice:Processing Payment Failed – sent to the customer, explaining the situation and prompting them to try again. This ensures that the client is informed when their payment does not go through without risking premature or duplicate payments.

Admins can manually switch invoices into or out of Processing status as needed (but manual changes do not trigger the “Payment Failed” notification.) Also, a new setting is available in Settings → Billing → Misc: Prolong failed processing invoice due date. When enabled, HostBill will automatically extend the due date of invoices that revert from Processing to Unpaid and would otherwise become overdue. This avoids triggering late fees or overdue notices in such cases.

News in Forms

Changes in Forms improve product configuration and give you more control over form behavior and price presentation. You can now define default values for multi-option form fields, such as dropdowns (select), radio buttons, or multi-choice fields used in product configuration forms. Previously, when a product was added to the cart, the first option in a select list was automatically selected by default. That might not always reflect your preferred or most common configuration. With this update, you can now explicitly choose which value should be pre-selected when the form is loaded – giving you greater flexibility and better control over how your products are presented and sold. This is especially useful when you want to promote a specific plan, configuration, or price tier as the starting/default selection.

To complement the update above, we’re introducing a new setting under the “Other Settings” tab in product configuration: Minimal Price Calculation Method. This setting controls how the “Starting from” price is calculated and displayed on your order pages. You can choose to calculate the minimal price based on the lowest possible configuration (as was the default behavior until now), or switch to a new method that uses the default field values (defined in your product form) to determine the minimal price. This allows you to present a price that better matches the typical or promoted product setup, instead of the absolute lowest configuration, which may not be the most relevant for your customers.

We’ve expanded the functionality of the recently added Phone Number form field by introducing a new action button in the account details view. This button allows admins to quickly send notifications directly to the phone number provided via the product’s form field. It seamlessly connects the phone number input component with notification-sending feature — making it easier than ever to reach customers through the contact details they’ve provided during the order process.

Other release notes

We’ve introduced several improvements to make managing client communications more flexible and precise. When creating a new contact in the admin area (and in the client area using the 2019 theme), you can now manually select the contact’s preferred language—instead of defaulting to the main client’s language. Additionally, we’ve added a new setting for file downloads, allowing you to notify not just the client, but also their contacts when a new file is uploaded. To support this, a new contact privilege—“Receive file-related emails”—has been added, giving you full control over which contacts should be informed about new downloadable files.