We are beginning to develop a Billing System or Customer Managment System that will operate on Windows 2000 Servers with SQL or Access back end.

We have looked over http://www.Billadmin.com and that looks like a great system however, I don't think a lot of small hosting companies want to pay per month or per customer in their database Or have all there information hosted elsewhere.

We would like as many ideas as we can get of options that you may want to see or need. Anything you would like to see or improved upon to make hosting a little easier. So, please give me some feedback. Anyone that can give us some good ideas will receive free beta's and a full version. We will begin working on the full program within a week, so there is still time for new ideas.

Thanks for your time.

Brad
http://www.vortechhosting.com

Brad,

You will definitely need it to interface with different gateways, i.e. - authoriz.net, cybercash.

Have the opportunity to create invoices that are e-mailable to the client which would make the world easier for the billing staff.

Allow searching of invoices by invoice number and account so if there is a question by the client you can easily find the problem.

Allow logging of comments to each account so if the people have talked to you, you can write down what you talked about and refer to it later.

Ill think of some more later.

We will have it working with authoriz.net, cybercash at first then going to add about 5 others also.
The invoice and account setup type stuff in e-mail is a must that is one of my main things in this.
Logging of comments is a must as well kind of hard to do with out that. :)

We use a Access database we made here in house it works for the most part but really can't do every thing we want like the invoices e-mailing right from it. Plus with it being ASP will be every easy to make it work with control Panels such as hostingcontroller.com and any other ASP based Control Panels that come out.

We have looked over every ISP webhosting billing system we could find but still want new and cool ideas and feed back on if it is even needed. I am sure there are some small NT host out there that could us some thing like this so the more feed back the better i will make it..HEHE

Thanks for your feedback Paul_Szymanski and they are some very good ideas and point.

If you would like i will send you a copy once we have it going so you can check it out if you would like. Just let me know.

Sorry, I hate to be negative but an Access database? - You're not serious are you? You can't build a serious product from Access if you ask me, you need a proper database like MS SQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL.

Access databases's work just well as long as you dont have a huge number of records in there, of course your right a more scalable solution would be sql...

I know Access databases work, but a proper server would surely be the best bet for something like this.

Also would a SQL Server not be more secure then an Access database? I'm pretty sure it would be.

Other then that, it is a good idea and I am currently working on a system for in house use at the moment.

I think we got a lit mixed up here :)
What I meant was we are as in right now are using Access database just for our own database needs. When we do this it will be SQL 2000. That would be just nut to try what we are planning on Access database.. :)

We have not fully made up our mind on how it will all work yet. I am not sure if we would want it hosted only like billadmin.com or like rodopi.com where you install it and we sell it in the # of users or servers you need to manage or if we just want to do it where the host installs it and pays per server and can use it for unlimited # of customers.

We are looking at all the best way. We may do it all 3 ways I am not sure right now. Just trying to get as many great ideas as I can with in this post of what host need or want in a billing system / Management system that will also interface with all major NT based Control Panels. We will also look in to making it work with other control panels as well like Plesk and some other unix based.


We are working up a list of every thing we are planning to add in to the system now and how it will all get laid out I will post that once it is done as well so maybe some of you could be some feedback on if there should be any thing else added.


Thanks
Brad

OK, there's some requirements that I would like to see in a system that I have not seen in any of the 50 or so systems I've evaluated (at least, not in any of those systems that we could even come close to affording - I think some of the $10,000+ systems had most of these features, but none in the <$2,000 range).

First of all, creating a billing system, while nice, isn't really going to fulfill most companies' needs. You really need to create a total customer management system. One system I looked at, Hawk-I, met all of our needs except it didn't have the space for technical information - which meant we had to have two systems for customer management instead of just one which we'd have preferred.

One thing I highly recommend is *not* to make it a hosted solution like BillAdmin. I absolutely fell in love with BillAdmin when I saw it - it was almost perfect for our needs. Simple, effective, and had almost all the features we'd need on a day-to-day basis. But the fact that it was a hosted solution that we could not simply purchase and run on our own box made me decide not to buy it. The idea of hosting confidential customer data, not to mention customer credit card information, on someone else's server makes my skin crawl. No thank you. I'd much rather put it on our own server behind our own firewall where we know it'll be safe and secure (and if it isn't safe and secure we have no one but ourselves to blame). I don't want to get sued by a customer because someone else's server got hacked and their credit card info got stolen!

A couple of notes - I wouldn't make it require W2K or SQL2K - Win NT 4.0 and SQL 7.0 are really still the standards. Even though many companies have upgraded to W2K (though certainly not all), I would say the majority of hosting companies have *not* yet up graded to SQL2K. Plus, both W2K and SQL2K require a lot more powerful server than the earlier software does - and if other companies are anything like mine, they'd much rather toss their customer management stuff on a retired PII400 server than have to buy a brand new PIII800. I mean, we've got several older servers just sitting around waiting for something to do - they're great boxes that just are past their operational lifespans as web servers, but could absolutely handle the load of a billing system.

Let's see - what else have I learned in the last year of evaluating dozens of billing packages (none of which have met our needs 100%). Oh - facilities for issuing service credits vary greatly, but most billing packages don't have sufficient power in that area. Obviously we all strive for 100% uptime, but sometimes things do go wrong, and when that happens, issuing credits to your customers in a speedy manner is essential. I've counted several different ways we've needed to issue credits over the 3 years we've been in business - individually on a per client basis, individually on a server basis (crediting all clients residing on a specific server), or based on a range of IP addresses (issuing credits to all clients residing on a certain range of IPs). It would be incredibly helpful to be able to credit customers using these (and possibly other) criteria, automatically, instead of having to do it one-at-a-time like many of the other billing systems I've looked at have required.

We'd *really* like to be able to integrate our signup form into the billing system - so that when a client signs up, instead of the signup coming into our e-mail system and then having to enter that info into the billing, it automatically goes into the billing system and we go into that software to process new signups (however, it should definitely go into a "queue" area where we can reject the signup if needed - that happens sometimes).

Now, in my opinion, what we *don't* need is just as important as what we do. We do not need the billing system to integrate with the web servers for any reason. I know that some companies would like this, and I do understand that automation is essential to running a hosting company, but when you're talking about setting up or removing accounts I'd really rather have a LHB oversee that than a computer. If you intend to put web server integration into the software, please make sure that it can be disabled easily without losing other functionality of the system.

We do not need a tech support tracking system as part of the billing program. That's not to say you should leave that feature out if you're inclined to put it there, but if you aren't inclined to put in that type of feature it's not going to hurt our feelings and we certainly wouldn't base our buying decision on that factor - I doubt many other customers would either.

We do not need a program that's going to cost us monthly fees, or a tremendous amount per user we have. If you're going to make and sell a program, make and sell the program - don't expect your customers to send you a check every month, or expect them to pay you every time they pass a certain "threshold" in terms of the number of clients they have. Sell the software, period. It doesn't cost you any more to provide a software license to a web host with 1 million clients than it does to provide that license to a web host with 100 clients - so don't price it like it does. If you want recurring revenue from it, then release new versions every few months and charge a (small) upgrade fee to existing customers.

Well, anyway, I've just written a novel here and probably given you lots to think about. I'd love to provide more feedback, though, as your designs progress further. And I'd be happy to beta test the product - Lord knows I've had the opportunity to look at so many billing systems in the last year one more would be a pleasure. Please e-mail me if you have any questions or need more advice. As a potential customer of your solution I'm happy to help out.

Also, what's your time-frame on when you might have something worked out? As I said, I'd be very interested in looking at this when it's ready, but am on a deadline of my own.

Good luck,

Jason

Hi All!

Just a note... BillAdmin 2.0 will be available for remote licenseing. If you don't want your DB or the program to be hosted on our systems, you can setup your own billing server (or we will set one up for you).

Along with that, it will have more gateways, control panel integration modules (not just cpanel), install scripts, a smooth looking customer interface, tons of new admin features, etc, etc. I'm really looking forward to the friendly competition! ;)

I'm watching the forums here, and love hearing all the great suggestions!

Regards,
Matt

<edit>Also, BillAdmin is not billed per customer, rather it is billed per server. (until the next version is released, then all licenseing will be changed completely)</edit>

[Edited by Site5-Matt on 02-27-2001 at 11:56 PM]

Hey Matt,

Hell if you are coming out with one that can run on our own servers hell i would buy it and save a lot lot a dev. time. If you plan on selling it in a software type where we can buy it would be great. But your system was made in Perl right. Would that run on Windows using SMTP if your planning on selling it?
We are planning on doing some thing like yours but a ASP or ColdFusion based and sell it our right and offer a hosted ver. of it as well. But if you plan on selling your i would just be happy with buying it. I just dont like having all our users info some where else.


Thanks
Brad
Vortech Inc.
http://www.vortechhosting.com

P.S. Just like to tell you that you did a great Job with billadmin it will be hard to out do but hell thats what makes it fun..HEHE

Hi Vortech,

Porting it to windows shouldn't be a problem. I think the sendmail/SMTP issue is the only thing that is actually OS dependant, and that could be changed in a matter of minutes.

You would need a database server. Currently it supports mySQL... however I'm pretty sure that it would work with almost any SQL based database system (supported by Perl DBI, of course). Which SQL server were you planning to use? I'll take a look and see if it's supported for you.

Regards,
Matt

[Edited by Site5-Matt on 02-28-2001 at 10:39 AM]

Matt,

When will v2.0 be ready? We'd be very interested in evaluating it. We also would need it to be ported to NT. If you're going to do that, use SMTP socket connections for the mail, it works a lot better (and does indeed work on *nix as well on most mail servers).

When you say it's licensed per server, that's one thing we were confused about - can you explain that in a little more detail? We'd only be running billing on one machine anyway. Unless you mean it's per server we have (web servers), but if so that doesn't make much sense, since we would not be having the billing system interface with the web servers at all so I don't see what the web servers have to do with it. So, I think some clarification is needed.

Thanks,

Jason

Jason,

It's currently billed per server... as in, every account is on a specific server. If you have, say, 4 servers that you want to manage with BillAdmin, then you would be billed for 4 servers.

The reason it is like that is because most of the current users are using BillAdmin with Cpanel. BillAdmin integrates into both layer 1 and layer 2 of this system. It manages new signups, sets them up on the remote server, etc.

It also gives a good estimate as to how much usage you are getting out of the system. In most cases, a company with a single server will have less customers and be making less money than a company with 5 servers.

Of course, dedicated servers are not included in the server count... only servers that are used for shared hosting.

Hope that clarifies it a bit.

Matt

We use a packge that we wrote inhouse.
It's called CBMS and it's free.

Check it out at http://www.voxel.net

Click on software -> CBMS.