We have just started using what is looking to be a fantastic small business accounting package that is free and open source, runs on a FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP (BAMP) application stack. It has several credit card processing gateway options. Because we use Chase Bank’s Orbital Paymentech gateway with our merchant account provider (we will gladly give you a referral) we needed to set Phreebooks up to use the Paymentech module that came from those smart developers who have helped build the OsCommerce and Zen-Cart code base.
As we use the software more and learn about it we see it’s potential for lots of great things, but there were a few gotchas along the way. The forum over at http://phreebooks.com has some answers to other questions too. It’s not as well documented as it needs to be, so hopefully, we can help fix that along the way when we figure things out while we adopt it for our use here at iDotMind.com.
Here are the steps I had to take to get Phreebooks to work with the Chase Paymentech (Orbital) gateway payment module.
- First, be sure to register your web server’s IP with Chase Paymentech Orbital Gateway tech support since their firewall is set to reject traffic from unknown senders.
- Make sure your have curl support installed with the necessary libraries for your distribution (we use FreeBSD so if there’s anyone who needs help getting this set up feel free to hit me up).
- Make sure your firewall is allowing outbound initiated traffic on port 443 (not just inbound stateful traffic on 443..this one took me a minute to tweak on FreeBSD with PF “pass out on $ext_if from any to any port https”).
- When you add customers only use short abbreviations for the state since Chase Paymentech/Orbital isn’t smart enough to accept full names of states for the transaction. Perhaps this could be changed in the input address fields for customer/vendor, etc.. and could have some error checking added in a future release to prevent sloppy data entry. If we do that we’ll be sure to give that code snippet back to the Phreebooks community.
- The payment will transact through the gateway and you will charge the card but it will NOT post to Phreebooks unless you go to modules/services/payment/paymentech.php and find line 413 or thereabout which reads:
And this one especially had us stumped for a day or so:
"/* DELETE ME */ return true; // force a fail to not post"
Either delete it, or comment it out more (like I did with some notes about why I did that. If you don’t want to do that you can just replace the entire paymentech.php module with the one I fixed.
You can go get it here: http://idotmind.com/phreebookshacks/paymentech.php.tar.gz
Awesome piece of software so far! Thanks for all your hard work Dave and everyone else who has helped to make free accounting software possible. We just adopted it and are really happy it looks so promising as we work the kinks out. I hope this is helpful for other people.
Written By Nestor Wheelock
Systems Architect and Client Support Guru
http://www.iDotMind.com
This article be freely shared non-commercially under the Creative Commons
Chase Paymentech Orbital Gateway Phreebooks Payment Module Gotchas by iDotMind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
