Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Software and Control Panels : Modernbill features

[Binx]

Hi everyone,

We will possibly be purchasing a company that uses Modernbill as their billing system. We can't decide whether to keep this software or go with our current billing software.We would like to get some feedback from anyone who uses this. The main drawback I could see was the inability to pro-rate charges and the lack of tracking extra services such as ips, and pop accounts and bandwidth overage. Is this the case or am I missing something here? Checked the demo but couldn't seem to find anything in the help section. The interface looks awesome, and there are a quite a few features I do like. Anyone with feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, and have a good weekend!

[eprodigy]

Modernbill has been very good to us, so far!

It DOES, in fact support pro-rating charges, keeping track of IP's and POP accounts, not sure about bandwidth overage.

Charge pro-rating should be under Tools-SystemConfig-Billing or Order options. Mabye under the Vortech config.

The rest of them are under package options on each account.

[Binx]

Thanks eprodigy!

Pro-rating and tracking was definintely a concern. I will log in to the demo again and play around a bit.

[OctaneDesign]

what is your existing system? it sounds very good

[Binx]

Originally posted by OctaneDesign
what is your existing system? it sounds very good

Our existing system is Optigold ISP
http://www.digitalpoint.com/products/isp/

It is a truly a feature rich product. I wouldn't even bother looking at the other software except for the fact that the company we may accquire is using it. I just wanted to keep their customers on a billing platform they were used to. Modernbill does look to have a lot of pros, just missing a few features I really like. Mainly the tracking and billing bandwidth through mrtg.

[tandem]

Forget about modernbil and stick to what you have IMO. MB has an inflexible ordering interface (it isn't template based) and won't give you any of the additional features you mentioned, like tracking and billing bandwidth. MB is a billing system made for shared web hosting, not dedicated. Even for shared hosting you will need to tweak the code to get the results you want.

eprodigy: > MB keeps track of IP's and POP accounts

This is slightly misleading; let's say, if the customer purchases another 5 POP accounts or a block of 16 IP's modernbill will not automatically increment the number of POP accounts or IP's in the customer's record. You will need to enter them manually each time a purchase is made for this type of additional resource. It will also not generate an automated invoice for these resources.

[Binx]

Wow. Well thats no good then. Thanks for the info tandem. Looks like I am going to have to do some manual entry to the existing system.

[thenetbox]

I'm sticking with Modernbill because of the huge todo list the admin there has... and they really are expanding really fast .. over all it does everything I need it to do and more.

[Esr Tek]

I too am stickin w/ MB ..
I have only had it 3 or so months and can see alto of differences in how it works and ease of usage

They recently expanded their support facilities and the list of changes and requests really DO get added in.

I think Jon and Micheal are great and look forward to the future w/ MB

[tandem]

Originally posted by thenetbox

I'm sticking with Modernbill because of the huge todo list the admin there has

They have always had huge todo lists. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all the items will come into reality or anytime soon!

For example, they had Quickbooks integration planned in their todo list in February 2002. 14 months later there's no sign of it.

Another example: They promised a major overhaul of the customer ordering process in Q1-2003 and that has past too.

Another one: The ability to order hosting from the user's control panel was promised as far back as a year ago. Current status: Feature not yet implemented.

Todo lists are a good marketing gimmick to promise the world without committing to any results.