I am wondering how do you all do these things, I am about to (hope to) start a little resellers hosting company.

I would like to know how do you give invoices? Is their a program that you use? Do you mail them? E-mail?

How do you charge your clients? At the beginning of every month for that month? Or at the end of the month…..


Also…
Is their a program that you use to keep track of accounts and billing? Even if I have to enter how much space they use a month and how much bandwidth, I wouldn’t mind, and I will be using PLESK and I know it tells me this. But to create the invoices.

Personally, I use my own custom software. It's rough and ready, but it does exactly what I need 8^)

I email out invoices on the 10th, payable by the 20th.

A couple of customer management programs people often mention are Ubersmith and phpManager (which can be found at http://www.ubersmith.com/ and http://phpmanager.taysoft.com/)

Hope thats a help to you!

a great bang for your buck is modernbill.com

Hello,

We use the billing software Optigold ISP. It is a wonderful billing/management program. They have a mailing list that if you have problems, the actual author of the program replies personally, usually within a few hours. He will even implement suggestions if they are reasonable. Updates are free, and you get the first 100 customers for free, then you can start to pay for more as you go.

Take a look at their website: http://www.optigoldisp.com

so u dont make them pay when they sign up for the plan, if you send them an invoice, then you must ask them to pay via paypal or a cheque, right???

Here comes the explanation - hope you can follow it techar hehe
It always sounds so awkward when I explain it, but it's not that bad :D

At the moment, I've got a setup fee, which is paid when people sign up.

Then on the 10th following, they receive their first proper invoice, which is for the period between when they signed up and the 10th, plus the first month in advance from the 10th. I then bill their credit card for that amount on the 20th.

if you get my drift.. :eek:

I will probably be changing that in the next week or two, perhaps to a 'pay on your anniversary' system. Seems a lot simpler in some ways, although it is nice having a single billing date.

I guess that's the good thing about having your own invoicing software - you have the flexibility to modify your billing practices however you want... When you can find the time to change the code :)

As for Paypal etc, currently I only accept Credit Cards and I process them through an online gateway to my merchant account. One of the best features of that is that I can upload a text file with all my transactions for the month and process them in one hit.

QuickBooks will do all that for you.

The main advantage I see of using my own system over say Quickbooks, is that when I'm finished coding it all, if someone signs up they will be added into my helpdesk, onto my signup list so I can approve their account once I've charged it and also onto my billing list all in one go. All I have to do is click one button and they're all setup and ready to go. :)

I think phpManager and ubersmith offer similar levels of automation, too.

Originally posted by goodness0001
a great bang for your buck is modernbill.com

I would also agree with this.. PHPManager is also nice..