Hello all,
I am currently using phpmanager and it gets the job done, but I need something more robust.

I am getting ready to become an independant contractor to contract out to my current employer and obviously I am going to have to invoice them for time spent working for them.

I would REALLY like to have one billing/client manager that can handle hosting accounts as well as "hourly fees". I am considering Modernbill, but I think all it has is the stuff for hosting ("bill by month, quarterly, annually, etc").

I could always just get quickbooks I suppose, but I was hoping there was something else I could use for both to integrate with my control panel also.

Ideas?

ModernBill, worth the Price!! :-) It is very good with that and it has a built in helpdesk!!

I haven't looked hard at ModernBill in a while, so I don't know if it can handle selling items other than fixed-cost (ie, things like creating invoices for hourly-rate jobs, et cetera). With Perlbill, you can create fixed-cost items and sell those as well as create invoices for any item / any cost. However, be aware that Perlbill is still unstable from time to time. If you go with it and upgrades come out, don't upgrade until about a week has gone by and no one has posted a bug to the support forums. (Even then, test with a throwaway installation first before putting it over your live data.)

Good thing to remember with any software; but it has been very true in the past with Perlbill. Right now it's at the stage where if you buy it thinking that it's going to be 100% perfect, you may be disappointed. It's also far easier to customise if you're comfortable coding HTML by hand - a few of the customers I've seen over on the Perlbill support forums seem to sound like they're looking for a (what's the word, what's the word) turnkey? no, that's not it - solution: something that they can install, then customise with the ease of using one of those Easy Page Builder software things. You really need to be more comfortable working with the HTML; and if you're comfortable enough to do minor tweaks to the Perl coding or at least find and edit the output, you're that much better off.

so modernbill will allow me to bill "per hour" instead of just monthly, quarterly, etc?

ie: obviously I am going to have to manually create the client account (duh lol) but it will let me bill other than the normal "web host" time frames?

thanks :)

I don't know about Modernbill, but currently, Perlbill doesn't have a "by the hour" selector. You'd have to type in the total amount of the invoice, then you could add in details: Web design, FooBarBaz.com, X number of hours at Y cost per hour. (example, obviously)

Again, Modernbill may let you do this. I'm not sure - I haven't investigated it thoroughly for a while now.

gotcha. I think modernbill probably offers the same kind of thing (PHPManager does with custom invoicing).

thanks for the replies :)

quickbooks.

I dont think modernbill is geared towards other products. Not until the order form is changed.

Originally posted by psychalgia
quickbooks.
Not host a bunch of domains. It can be very difficult to use quickbooks. We used it early on. Worked great. Move now while it is easier. Do not do it when you have to.

I would love to know about a great package for hosters.

Originally posted by raq2dotcom
Not host a bunch of domains.

i dont think thats his goal.

btw, afterhours bandwidth could be chewed up nicely by a game server. i know i only have time to play on the weekends and early morning.

well, hopefully eventually I will be hosting a lot of domains 8)

I am looking at Clientexec. It has an option to invoice for "work performed" and you can pre-define different types of work (support, development, admin, etc)

The only thing keeping me from buying it right now is that it currently doesn't integrate with CPanel/WHM :(

I think the problem is there are plenty of accounting/billing packages that work great for most businesses and there are a few (MB, phpMan, CE, etc) that are meant specifically for hosting. the problem is that there is not much, if any, cross over.

there was just a thread or two in the users' forum at ModernBill on this... Basically, you set a package as say an hour's worth of design time at $x/hour, and invoice using the quantity field.

Pretty simple to do in MB v4 actually.

Mark

ohhh that sounds nice. I didn't see that in the online demo.

I will have to check again to see if it's there. Even if it's not in the demo.. it's there in the full product :)

thanks for that heads up BuffaloWeb!