Hi All, This message is intended for those people who work at a web hosting company and are familiar with their billing system. I work for a company called Inovaware. We are a supplier of billing systems for various IP businesses. I am writing a story for Web Hosting Magazine entitled "Blueprints For Billing." It will be a vendor-neutral article aimed at providing basic information on billing and customer care systems used in modern Hosting/IDC environments. I would be interested in hearing about systems you are currently using, no matter the sophistication. I will not be mentioning any company names in this article, but the information I get may affect the direction the story goes. I am particularly interested hearing from companies who are finding their current billing system inadequate, and want to know why. I have talked to a number of companies already, but want to get as much information as possible.

To sum it up, we tired quite a bit of billing system, all geared toward ISP's

We been doing hosting for 5 years, we finally ended up contracting a company to build a system for us, they never completed the work and we were out $5,000.00

Just a month ago, we decided on a in house solution and its already completed. We are now in the final stages of the system and plan on marketing it.

This is a subject near and dear to my heart (and my head, since the frustration of trying to find a decent billing solution has caused much hair loss).

The problem, as I see it, is that there are no (or very very few, but frankly I'd choose to use no) billing programs designed with web hosts in mind. I'm not kidding! Yeah, you've got Alabanza's billing solution, but you have to be leasing servers from Alabanza to use it. You've got Site5's BillAdmin, but again, Site5 has decided to make that available only to their dedicated server customers.

Everyone else, unless I've just missed someone, are either not design for web hosts or are just not ready for prime time.

Programs like Optigold ISP, BillMax, Rodopi, Platypus, Hawk-I, CyberACS, NTPayMaster, and on and on and on are all perfectly good billing software for ISPs. But when a web hosting company tries to implement one of these software solutions there are problem. For example, all of these programs include integration with dial-up Radius servers. The problem is, if you're a web host, you don't have Radius servers. But these ISP-designed billing products are so focussed on that Radius integration that 2/3 of the features that are included with product are useless to web hosts (this is a phenomenon I like to call "feature bloat").

Then you have issues of things web hosts need that ISPs typically don't - like the ability to keep track of IP address assignments, or even domain names (yes, some of these actually don't support such a basic concept of identifying the account by it's domain name!) One that I looked at didn't even give you the ability to specify the e-mail address to send the customer's bills to! It just assumed that you'd be sending them to the customers "username@yourisp.net" address - but a web host doesn't give their customers e-mail addresses at their domain name, and as such there's no way that software would have worked!

What we use right now is a home-grown solution, a combination of a database for tracking some items and individual client files for tracking technical information. It's slow, it's ugly, and it just doesn't work effectively. But after more than a year of trying to find a billing system that would work for us, and after evaluating dozens of products, I'm still no closer to finding a solution.

Hope this helps. And if in your research you come across a billing package that you think might actually work well for web hosts, please post it here - I'm always on the lookout for something new to evaluate.

Thanks,

Jason

I have to agree with Jason, im a little tired of these billing systems designed for dialups who market it to everyone and their mom, I too have tried every billing system out there and havent found one that even comes close to fitting our needs, we too are designing our own billing system, at the moment we use batch billing through our payment gateway which works quite well and even generates invoices and all the goods, but its defen. not a system I want to use forever.

A good billing system needs to incorporate these features:

1. Industry oriented, design a billing system for the hosting industry and market it to the hosting industry, dont try to market a dial up billing system to hosting providers, we dont need and dont want all the extra bells and whistles.

2. Ease of use, while I dont have a problem learning the inner details of a software package, I dont want to have to spend time and money teaching it to everyone in accounting/billing, someone should be able to launch and start working.

3. Data exporting, many people try to use accounting package for billing and billing packages for accounting. This never works, your product should deal with only billing, and it should have a feature built in that exports the data to a accounting package with ease.

4. Better Online Support: ARE BUSINESS'S ARE ONLINE, we want to be able to email out invoices, let customers log in and check pending invoices, and be able to make credit card or echeck transactions to satisfy those invoices over the web. These features shouldnt be something that are a afterthought and a company buying the billing software has to hire a programmer to integrate it in, it should be turnkey and very easily implemented into the larger gateways.

Jason, and cbaker17,,,

I too have been through ... at leat 15 different billing programs. You name it, and we have used it, along with the good old paperwork files...

NOBODY covers ALL the needs of a web host.
ALL is the key word here.

I can say after being one of the lucky few that had a chance to use billadmin, that it is by far the closest to doing all we needed it to do. It is simple and easy to use, and ...

IT REALLY WORKS.
There are a couple things that I don't care for, and there is room for improvement, but any host is going to have his own needs that are special to that one host.

But if Matt ever went full boar, this would be the system of choice from anything that is out there. Nothing comes close. I know.. we have tried all we could find.

Let's see.. important things needed for hosts..
Ip / domain name tracking, searchable, resellers with their customers plans listed under them, able to list multiple sites uner one customer billing record. I'm sure there are more host specific needs...

Tim L

what do you guys expect from a billing system??

I've tried almost every solution out there - I swear. Everyone wanted to try and modify an existing system to meet our needs. DOESN'T WORK!!!!!

I finally hired a guy to make an ordering/billing/invoicing system for me. I told him I wanted it completely simple, yet 100% reliable and functional.

After about 6 months of programming, tweaking and improving - he has come up with something I couldn't live without.

It's really simple - it takes my orders, throws them into a database and has multiple search features, etc. Everyday, I can simply list all the accounts that are due for renewal and invoice them with a click of a button.

It also allows me to send out a mailing to all customers.

I've told him that he REALLY needs to post his system in the Advertising section of WHT - but he's too shy. :)


--Tina

If he is to shy tell him he could give it to me as a present :)

We had similar problems as everyone else. Our billing records were being kept in an Excel spreadsheet, and everything was being done relatively manually each month.

We needed a web-based system that would run on our intranet, keep track of the support calls in the customers' accounts for CRM purposes, generate the monthly run of paper and emailed invoices at the push of a button, link to Cybercash to process credit card autopayments, and batch credits, connect to our web/mail/database servers to calculate server space usage, bandwidth usage, and SQL database calls, and bill for overages. it needed to be able to generate daily bank deposits, and any custom reports we needed. And that was very easy to use for a new user.

Because we still have legacy customers who we provide connectivity to, it also needed to have the features to track connect-time usage, and generate overage charges. As well as track a number of legacy services that all have different exclusions and overages, and all the 'special deals' that have non-standard pricing, etc.

We searched high and low, and could not find anything that would give us the functionality we needed, so our SQL wizard on staff built one for us. And because it is our system, we can fiddle with it and make changes on the fly as our services and needs change, and not be locked in to one package, or have to bring in an outside developer.

I've been considering making this available as an open-source application, so that anyone who buys it can modify it to fit their needs, or resell the modified version-we don't offer Internet access to billing records to our customers, for confidentiality reasons, mostly. Among our customer base, the person at the company who handles the billing on the account, usually is not the same person who has the master password for the account, and that person may not even work for the company, they are often outside developers.

The SQL developer just sees no value in it to anyone else but us, and until I can get him to unclutch, I can't share it around. He has a habit of developing things that might be marketable (and some that have the potential of being lucrative), but sees them through such a narrow focus that he can't see any other use other what and who he developed it for. Talk about sitting on a gold mine.

I feel the pain of all of your posts an endeavors on funding a suitable system for Web Hosting Companies.

My company is entering a new line of service for custom Software/Application Design and Development and this sounds like a much needed system.

Our developers have the experience and expertise in most all types of software, platforms, etc. I have further responded to this issue with the topic entitled, "Billing and CRM Solutions for Web Hosts, Resellers, etc" to hopefully start a thread on our needs of Web Hosts and further turn those needs into custom solutions for everyone.

Kindest regards,

Jeff