If you ever have to migrate WHMCS to a new server, you will want to make sure that your automation is working (cron entry installed), and that the date.timezone setting is correct in your php.ini file.

I had migrated WHMCS to a new server recently and it was driving me crazy that the daily 9:00 am automation set up in the Automation Settings was not occurring at the proper time. Sometimes it was 2 hours off, sometimes 4 hours off. Eventually I figured it out – I had edited the php.ini but forgot to set the timezone at all.

date.timezone = “America/New_York”

Bingo. That’s all it took. I manually forced a run of my WHMCS cron command. And afterwards, in the Automation Status section of WHMCS it showed the proper number of hours until the next daily automation was to occur.