April Fools! Thanks for playing along. You can still download the plugin and pretend, if you want.

Parallel Payment Optimizer, or “Parallel” for short is a revolutionary new way to increase revenue and lower customer attrition. Parallel is a free plugin for Blesta. Watch the video below (don’t forget to turn on your sound), then download the plugin and start paralyzing today!

Download Parallel

Installation Instructions

1. Click the button above to download.
2. Unzip and upload parallel_po to your /plugins/ directory.
3. Login to Blesta and go to Settings > Company > Plugins > Available.
4. Click the “Install” button for Parallel Payment Optimizer.
5. Go to Tools > Parallel Payment Optimizer and start Paralyzing!

How does it do it?

Parallel utilizes a global cloud of specialized helper bots to send friendly little signals to nonpaying customers. These signals softly nudge your customers into logging in and making payment where other methods of collection typically fail.

Join the Discussion

Join the discussion on our forums and share your experience with the Parallel Payment Optimizer!

I’m a fan of all operating systems, Windows, Linux, and OSX. I just happen to make all these videos I post on a Macbook.. an old late 2006 model, that just couldn’t keep up anymore. I’ve had to retire it, and am excited to be doing these on a new Macbook Pro. I haven’t missed the spinning pinwheels of death one bit. Hopefully this means I can up the production value a bit.. only time will tell.

So this week, just a quick sneak peak at a feature that a lot of people have been asking for.. We call it, Loginless Payments. It’s difficult enough at times to get customers to pay, so this is all about making it as easy as possible to collect, and providing a great customer experience at the same time. A customer may have forgot their password to login, but it’s no longer an obstacle because we have eliminated that step entirely.

When a customer gets an invoice in their email, a special link is provided to pay that invoice. It doesn’t log them into their client area, but it does let them pay without having to login. This link is included in all payment reminders and late notices as well. Click, pay, done.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound (And turn it up! This one turned out a little on the quiet side for some reason).

We’ve talked about payments before, but this week I wanted to go a little more in depth. The way payments are handled and applied by a billing system is important, things need to be accounted for.

Some popular billing systems do really strange things, like..

1. Create a new invoice when someone attempts to pay multiple open invoices for the sum of those invoices, and when that invoice is paid mark the others as paid.
2. Allow staff to mark an invoice as paid without recording a transaction.

Simply put, this leads to an accounting nightmare. If an invoice is marked paid, surely there should be a history of how and when that invoice was paid, right? Absolutely! Blesta handles this well in v3, but that’s not a new feature!.. We’ve been accounting for everything since the beginning.

Good billing software will let you pay a single invoice with multiple payments, and pay multiple invoices with a single payment. It should keep track of how much of which payments were applied to which invoices.

In this screenshot you can see that 2 payments were made to a single invoice, and the invoice still isn’t paid in full yet. (Click image to see full size)

It all comes down to this: We want to do things right, and we spend the extra time to do it right when others don’t. It’s this way with everything we do. We engage every feature with purpose and forethought. It’s about creating great software whether we sell a thousand copies or a million copies.

Last week I posted about Payment Accounts in version 3. This week I wanted to show you how those work when the rubber meets the road in the Staff interface. Perhaps the best new feature for Payments in version 3 is the ability to void and refund transactions in real-time when supported by the gateway.

This video focuses on..

1. Make Payment (Processing and voiding or refunding a credit card or ACH transaction)
2. Record Payment (Processing and voiding a manual payment, such as a check payment)

Payments in this version are more robust than previous versions. There’s a lot more you can do without leaving the screen, yet it’s remarkably simple and straight forward. I recommend taking the video full-screen, and be sure to turn your sound on.