Hey everybody,

I've been using Freshbooks for invoicing my clients so far - I like how it works, the clean & simple interface and the nice set of reports available. I recently signed up with Innohosting and now have access to WHMCS, and I like the fact that it allows people to buy domains & hosting. With no prior WHMCS experience, I'm trying to determine whether it is a better overall option than Freshbooks.

With Freshbooks, I have to manually create the hosting account in WHM, email the account info to the client, then go to Freshbooks to manually set up a recurring billing account. What would be cool is if WHMCS allows this process to be streamlined with minimal management from me.

Beyond that, Freshbooks has a nice set of reports available that WHMCS may have as well - like money earned this year or overdue accounts. One thing about WHMCS I noticed that was better was sending invoice reminders before an invoice is due - Freshbooks sends overdue notices the day after they're due.

It doesn't make sense to have two different billing systems so if WHMCS covers most of what Freshbooks does, it may be worth switching. Thanks to Innohosting, it costs less too ;-)

My other q is about payment gateways - Paypal is a given, but I'd like to provide an option that allows secure credit card processing. My clients seem totally thrown off by the concept of using a credit card with Paypal. I also know the Paypal horror stories and frankly need to hedge my bets. Paypal shouldn't be the only option. I've had Authorize.net on my mind (mainly due to the age/reputation/name) but would like to research other options. I won't be accepting mail-in payments in a few months, so I need options that are secure, easy to use (for clients) & reliable.

I've gotten great feedback and advice here so far - can't wait to hear what the responses will be. Thanks!

Well I think WHMCS if you need the complete hosting solution, FreshBooks, to me just seems mainly based on invoicing however I don't have much experience with it.

I can't talk about the different billing solutions, but in terms of gateways I certainly don't recommend offering PayPal as a single option (if at all). At the very least allow bank transfers or cheques, and consider a credit card gateway such as Authorize.Net (US) or ProTX (UK). I know in some cases you'll have to have been taking orders for a certain amount of time before you'll be able to get a merchant services account (at least here in the UK), so consider something like 2CheckOut as a temporary solution, but it doesn't give you the flexibility nor the professionalism of a company merchant account.

@StrongMotive: Freshbooks is primarily an invoicing solution. There's no integration with WHM, and I'm definitely not going to hire a dev to create a custom solution with their API. What has your experience with WHMCS been?

@MTSpace IT Solutions: I want to avoid checks/cheques due to international mailing (I'm relocating to Costa Rica and expect most clients to be in the US). I like the bank transfer idea, but would customers be willing to enter their bank account information? I imagine that they would be more willing to enter credit card information since they often have fraud protection.

I toyed around with Freshbooks but in the end selected WHMCS because of integration with WHMCS and my domain registrar.

I do feel that WHMCS's reporting features are not as advanced as what you'll find in Freshbooks. However, if you're proficient in Excel, you can create just about any reports that you need. :)

WHMCS support is excellent. They have an active community forum on their website that's worth subscribing to. Plus, WHMCS support answers troubletickets relatively quickly.

All in all, I would recommend WHMCS for your accounting/invoicing/customer management needs.

RH

RH - Thanks for the perspective. The reports are a nice bonus but as long as WHMCS can export the basic data (what, when, how much), I can figure things out ;-). The integration is key - the less I need to do the better. It's not ideal to perform several steps manually. I'll have to check out the WHMCS forums to get a feel for all the things it can do.

I recommend www.cdgcommerce.com (http://www.cdgcommerce.com/) and their free gateway Quantum

Is that the one listed in the WHMCS supported gateways list as 'Quantum Gateway?'

Is that the one listed in the WHMCS supported gateways list as 'Quantum Gateway?'

Yes. I highly recommend them as well.

I knew peeps would have good suggestions here :-)

I realized a big bonus after reading about Quantum Gateway - Freshbooks has charges for the number of autobill accounts you can have. WHMCS is looking better and better.

I would recommend getting your own "merchant account" rather than using third party payment gateways like Paypal and Google Checkout... When billing clients with Paypal all the client will see on their Credit Card statement is a charge from "Paypal".. This will confuse your customers.. Rather if you have your own "Merchant Account" your customers will see a charge from your company.. This helps in branding and reduces the chargebacks from customers..

I recommend using WHMCS, it will integrate everything you are currently doing and streamline it for you. It does give you yearly, monthly and I think maybe weekly reports on how much you are earning. You can also view all your clients under different categories (suspended, active etc).

As for Payment gateways, I wholeheartedly suggest Google Checkout. My clients tell me it is much faster and easier to use than PayPal and as a host, the charges are just over half of what PayPal charge. Plus there is no charge for API intergration.

Hope that helps,
Mike

Ah - I did not know that's what a proper merchant account entailed. That definitely makes a 3rd party gateway less appealing. I've been leaning towards CDG Commerce after getting the recommendations here and reading up a bit about them. They seem to provide very good value.

Also, WHMCS supports a LOT more payment gateways than Freshbooks. Looks like we've got a winner!

We primarily use Freshbooks, not because it has tons of features, but because its simple and its made by professionals. Its not bloated with 100's of options which we dont really need from other billing systems such as WHMCS, and that's a complement to WHMCS ;)

Sometimes there is a bit of manual work involved to get it started, but its worth it. I love it. I love it. I love it.

What's your ordering & invoicing process then?

I recently signed up with Innohosting and now have access to WHMCS

Welcome aboard!

My other q is about payment gateways - Paypal is a given, but I'd like to provide an option that allows secure credit card processing

We personally use PayPal and a merchant account from PayPal (PayPal Pro). The PayPal merchant account has a monthly charge of about $40 per month (£20).. It's a little more expensive than others out there, but we use it because all funds become centralised into one payment processor.

This allows us to increase the amount we process through PP and in return, we receive some lower favourable commission fees.

PP Pro functions as any other merchant service. In that you receive a virtual terminal, AVS, can perform pre-authorisations, credit, void etc. PayPal provides a different control panel for managing the merchant side.

It works very well for us..

What's your ordering & invoicing process then?
Well, I cannot go into too much detail but basically we use one of the "Auto-Bill capable" gateways to process monthly recurring credit card transactions and use the recurring profile to add or remove services. Very easy and straight forward and all the clients who pay via credit card are easily charged without any intervention on our part or the clients.

And for people who want to pay via paypal, we also create a recurring profile for them so that invoices are generated automatically each month and then they are sent an email notifying of the new invoice. Then they have to manually login to freshbooks and make the payment via paypal each month. Its a bit cumbersome for us as well as the clients but they are willing to do that.

We also use WHMcs, excellent product and great support.

I'm a Freshbooks user and I love it. However, it's really an apple to oranges comparison. Freshbooks does one thing only: send invoices. It does it very well. I've tied it to my backend systems with their API.

I don't currently do auto-bill, but I'm looking at using PayPal Payflow Pro. Does anybody have any experience with that particular PayPal product?

I have personally utilized both systems. The both have their strengths and their weaknesses. I do like WHMCS for the complete hosting solution billing; however, Freek Books does have a very nice setup. I do believe you'll save alot of time by utilizing WHMCS. CDG offers a great product with authorize.net for a gateway.

@HNLV: I don't extreme details :-P. Just wondering how you do it generally. For example, with Freshbooks I have to
1) receive request for hosting
2) go to WHM, create account
3) email account info to client (taking WHM's email and making it more user-friendly)
4) go to Freshbooks and setup a new recurring account

I hope with WHMCS that I could skip all or at least 3 of those steps

@SeeksZach: Freshbooks is gorgeous, but I really like the idea of using WHMCS for hosting, so perhaps I can just use it for my web design/dev/consulting invoicing as well. It's all one business, so having 2 billing systems is overkill. I will say if I didn't host or want to host, Freshbooks rocks.

There is one feature of Freshbooks that's really cool, which is Time Sheets. Enter the times for tasks (related to a specific project), then invoice later. But to keep track of time, I use a cool Adobe Air app called TimeLoc which can keep track of time but also revenue. You enter a project and the hourly charge (if there is one) and it outputs daily and monthly CSVs with time & earnings. All I have to do is plug the info into a WHMCS invoice and voila.

Hey guys, I'm the running our integrations program at FreshBooks. I just found this conversation, and I *had* to jump in. First, thanks for all the warm kudos!

This one tickled my fancy because right now, I'm looking at how to make FreshBooks even better for our web hosting customers by streamlining the provisioning and deprovisioning process.

While you said you can't pay for an integration, I certainly can. If you folks can tell me in technicolor what exactly you need (be as selfish as you want), I can turn it into some sort of plan to make it real.

If you reply here, or directly to me (sunir splat freshbooks.com) if you want to keep it private, that would be amazing and I would be in your debt.

Cheers,
Sunir Shah, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks
(416) 481-6946 x224
Twitter: freshbooks | sunir

@HNLV: I don't extreme details :-P. Just wondering how you do it generally. For example, with Freshbooks I have to
1) receive request for hosting
2) go to WHM, create account
3) email account info to client (taking WHM's email and making it more user-friendly)
4) go to Freshbooks and setup a new recurring account

I hope with WHMCS that I could skip all or at least 3 of those steps


@echoleaf, a couple questions. How do you receive requests? How do you decide to provision an account based on a request? What do you do to create an account?