Some Billing Things

[mvmoay]

Hey guys,

 

we are actually looking for a better solution for our customer management. Instead of building a new one by ourselves, we are thinking about blesta or whmcs. But there are some important things, that need to be supported. As I can't find any information about those, I'll ask them here. 

 

 

1) Can blesta bill all products annually?

With most of our customers, the relationship is built on trust. They do get bills once a year for everything that happened within the last year. So, if we registered a domain for them, they will be billed months later. The hosting, which should appear on the bill with a monthly fee, should also be billed yearly, not monthly.

 

Is this possible? Will the new prorata features cover this?

 

2) Is it possible to NOT notify users of any bills via mail? We want to notify them personally, most of the customers do want to get a letter.

 

3) We do provide 4 hours of free support - is time billable in blesta? Is it possible to pack 4 hours of free support into a web package? If not: is the plugin structure flexible enough to realize such a feature?

 

Thanks for your replies!

[flangefrog]

1) Can blesta bill all products annually?

With most of our customers, the relationship is built on trust. They do get bills once a year for everything that happened within the last year. So, if we registered a domain for them, they will be billed months later. The hosting, which should appear on the bill with a monthly fee, should also be billed yearly, not monthly.

 

Is this possible? Will the new prorata features cover this?

I don't think this is possible exactly how you describe. Blesta does not support statements yet so if you set a hosting service to be billed monthly then an invoice will be created each month. What you could do is set the service to be billed yearly but mention the monthly price in the service name. This reminds me that I do want to build a statement plugin, but I can't commit to doing this anytime soon.

 

2) Is it possible to NOT notify users of any bills via mail? We want to notify them personally, most of the customers do want to get a letter.

Yes, it is possible to manually print and send invoices or have them sent automatically via InterFax or PostalMethods.

 

3) We do provide 4 hours of free support - is time billable in blesta? Is it possible to pack 4 hours of free support into a web package? If not: is the plugin structure flexible enough to realize such a feature?

Yes, you can create a "free support" service. If you do any other work you can manually create an invoice with the hours and rate or any other costs.

 

You mentioned a web package. Blesta works by having "services" such as web hosting, domain name, support contract etc. Each service will automatically generate an invoice according to the term you set (monthly, yearly etc). If your web package includes web hosting, a domain name and a support contract, you could create three different services, and if they all renew on the same date then each service will show as a line item on a single invoice. The other way to do it would be to have a single service such as web hosting, then several add-ons for that service for a domain name and support contract. These should show as line items on the invoice.

[mvmoay]

 

 

I don't think this is possible exactly how you describe. Blesta does not support statements yet so if you set a hosting service to be billed monthly then an invoice will be created each month. What you could do is set the service to be billed yearly but mention the monthly price in the service name. This reminds me that I do want to build a statement plugin, but I can't commit to doing this anytime soon.

 

That's too bad. :-( Our Clients pay in advance, so if anytime they decide to go away, we have to credit things partially. No way to do this half-automated with yearly billing...

 

What will the prorata billing feature do then? Isn't it made for billing yearly or quarterly or whatever?

 

Of course I could manage all time based support costs with handwritten invoices, but thats not, what an automatic billing system is for. I want to tell it, that i did 5 hours of support today. It should know, that 4 of them were free and that the last one has to be billed next time there is an invoice. Any way to realize this now or in the near future?

[flangefrog]

That's too bad. :-( Our Clients pay in advance, so if anytime they decide to go away, we have to credit things partially. No way to do this half-automated with yearly billing...

 

What will the prorata billing feature do then? Isn't it made for billing yearly or quarterly or whatever?

I didn't fully understand your reason for wanting to bill monthly. As I understand it the pro rata feature is for billing on a specific date (e.g. 1st January etc) and if a client signs up half way through the year they will only be charged for 6 months. From the tooltip:

Pro rata allows a specific day of the month to be set for the renewal of services created with this package. Only monthly and yearly periods will be affected by this option.

As far as I know when pro rata is enabled you can give refunds automatically when they cancel part way through a period. This may be what you're looking for. Even without pro rata you can manually give a refund to a client. Mike from Licensecart may be able to help you as I know he uses pro rata.

 

Of course I could manage all time based support costs with handwritten invoices, but thats not, what an automatic billing system is for. I want to tell it, that i did 5 hours of support today. It should know, that 4 of them were free and that the last one has to be billed next time there is an invoice. Any way to realize this now or in the near future?

Blesta is specifically built for web hosts and the functionality you describe seems more like how a software product built for design/development agencies would behave (e.g. workflowmax). However Blesta code is 99.4% open so anything is possible, you just need to hire someone to create a plugin.

 

Edit: Also, if a client pre pays the money will be added as credit to their account. This credit will be automatically applied to any invoices, or in Blesta 3.3 you or your clients can manually apply this to selected invoices.

[Michael]

Yeah as Flangefrog said Pro-rota is where you charge say on the 1st of the month. If they are before your cut of day you charge them from say 12th September to the 1st October, then they are invoiced again.

 

For hourly pay, on the invoices you put 5 50/60 for 5 hours and 50 minutes work, or just put 5 in the qty to charge 5 hours of work.

 

What I believe you want is Pro-Formla where you give them a temp invoice until it's paid and then they get a invoice marked paid. Blesta also has this in 3.3.x (Beta).

 

You can read more about the hourly pay here: http://videos.blesta.com/video/64763991.

[Paul]

One thing you could do is create an invoice with a future bill date. The invoice will not be delivered to the client until that date, nor will they see it in the client area. You can edit the invoice to add new items as they come up, and on the bill date the invoice will be visible and delivered. I did see that you don't want invoices delivered, in which case you can just set the client group to paper. Invoices will be "queued" under Billing > Print Queue, but you can periodically just mark them printed.

 

If you will have services under their accounts, the above method won't work, but you can always sync service renew dates to a specific day. Prorata can also be used to to this as well, but it works for a specific day of the month, so you can't say that you want everything to renew on January 1st for example, it would be the 1st of each month. EDIT: So, if they order on March 15th, and it's a 1 year term, it will charge them for either March 15 -> April 1, or both March 15 - April 1 and April 1 to April 1 of the following year, depending on your "cutoff" day in the prorata settings.

 

You can bill for x hours of support, but Blesta will not track that support automatically. I'd suggest using a sticky note to track that for each individual customer.