Recommendations for billing management software. - Page 4

mkhost.co.uk · 3rd March 2008

WHMCS is the best out there, modenbill is horrable, I think WHMCS is the best as it's userfriendly and better to intergrate.

Karl · 3rd March 2008

MB has been bought buy Parallels now hasn't it?

andyf · 3rd March 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Karl

MB has been bought buy Parallels now hasn't it?

I thought they were just 'partners' (in the assured interoperability sense). Though it wouldn't surprise me if Parallels don't borg someone else very soon.

Cranky · 4th March 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Karl

MB has been bought buy Parallels now hasn't it?

I don't think so. It might be on the radar though.

They have almost as many billing products in development as control panels:

PBA Enterprise (PEM.Billing) - C++ with PHP store
PBA Standard (HSPcomplete) - Perl with PHP store
HSphere - Perl?
Helm - ASP.NET?

They are all very different codebases, so I'm not sure adding another could make things much more difficult, and AFAIK they don't have a PHP-based billing system yet.

Penguin · 5th March 2008

We're in the process of switching to WHMCS as well - I have to say I've been very impressed with both the product and also their level of support. We looked at Modernbill briefly, however I really don't think it comes anywhere near.

skynethosting · 5th March 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by mkhost.co.uk

WHMCS is the best out there, modenbill is horrable, I think WHMCS is the best as it's userfriendly and better to intergrate.

Yes that's probably the best out there. Unlike other products the owner/developer Matt does most of the support himself so things get done real fast.

wise · 5th March 2008

the current beta version of CE easily rivals whmcs - there is an argument to say it is better ...

Penguin · 5th March 2008

CE seems to lack integration modules though, especially Nominet which I would say has to be a must

wise · 5th March 2008

the below is a small sample of the new features implimented:

Support Module New and Enhanced Features
Version 3.1 of ClientExec includes a revamped and much more robust support
module. The support module has too many new features to list but a few are
listed below. No reason to use a 3rd party support tool as well as ClientExec.

Integrated Knowledge Base - Help keep the number of support requests
down by using the built-in knowledge base to answer customer's questions
before they ask! Assign articles as being internal to staff and even make
articles available when answering tickets on a specific ticket type.
i.e.: Showing cancellation steps when you get a ticket of type cancellation.

Suggested Articles – Suggest articles to your customers as they type trouble
tickets to provide them with quicker solutions and lessen the amount of tickets
concerning issues you already have articles written for.

Departments - You can now create departments, assign staff to departments
and create escalation rules for each. Assign a lead to each department and
have them sent the log of each ticket for that department on close. Have your
department Leads sent ratings on how the ticket was handled and much more.

E-mail Piping Rules - Automatically direct E-mails to support departments
or immediately escalate tickets based on the type of customer or e-mail. You
can also create special piping rules based on the customer's group. Have all
your high end resellers e-mail's sent to a specific support staff person for that
special attention.

Public Ticket Entering - Allow guest, non members, to submit support tickets
from public site. You can create special routing rules based on type of member
so you can have these non member e-mails get assigned to a department or sent
to a specific e-mail address

System Wide Updates
Overall the CE interface remains the same, a big emphasis will be made in the
following release to manage templates easier. System wide permissions, ability
to access module "hooks" within the main application have been improved as
has module development documentation. Some System Wide Updates:

Mobile Interface - You now have a mobile version of your application that can
navigated easy with your PDA or smart phone. Currently only order functionality
and ticket viewing is available.

New Admin Menu - The menu options were getting to many too keep in that
one menu section. So we have created an admin menu accessible to staff
members with permission. The new admin tab exists on top of the old main
menu and switching between the two is a snap.

Global Event Log - Tracking changes to a client account can be a life saver
when needing to retrieve their old data if they decide to skip town and change
their profile information. Our upcoming release will track all profile and package
changes, E-mails sent, invoices created and support ticket updates. A
dashboard option will be provided to monitor the last 25 events.

Custom Staff Permission Groups – Create custom permissions and save to
assign to staff members. We know the predefined permissions were not a one
size fits all solution, so you can now create exact permissions for your staff
members.

Support Staff Filters – Create filters for your support overview screen that
can be used later. If you want to view all support tickets opened by Staff
Member Alex, that took more than 24 hours to resolve, now you can define that
and save to use in your filter drop down in the support overview screen.

Ability To Search Custom Fields - No more frustration searching through
clients by hand. The ability to search custom fields makes tracking down certain
customers a breeze. Want to search on all your customers that speak French,
now you can search on anything.

Customer Profiles
The more information you have at your fingertips the better it is to manage your
company and for your staff to do their jobs. The following improvements have
been added for just that reason.

Domain Management Module - Our new domain management module will
make it easy for you and your clients to manage domains. The ability to update
the contact information, name servers, register name servers, toggle auto-renew,
generate transfer keys and import domains will save lots of time for your
customers.

Customer Notes – Add a quick note about your active customer. This note
will be accessible by all staff members for future retrieval. Mark a note as
forcing it to appear when a staff member is resolving an issue for that customer.
Example: You have a customer that needs special attention each time they
request server reboot. Add a note and select it to appear in ticket overview.
When customer submits a ticket, staff member will be presented with all such
notes for quick review.

Customer Groups: Allow further definition of customers by adding them to a
customer group, i.e., Partner, High Profile Customer, Trouble Customer, etc.

Customer Group Notes – Same as customer notes, but for an entire customer
group. You can also assign a customer group note to show in ticket overviews
for new tickets submitted by customers of that customer group.

Customer Events - From the client profile view all of the customer's events.
See what e-mails were sent, when invoices were sent or paid, and when support
tickets status has changed. Plus much much more.

Billing Module
The following features have been added to the core module of CE.

One-Time Payments Through Alternate Payment Gateways - It's now
easier than ever for your clients to make payments to you. If they are having
problems with their credit card or PayPal account they can now easily make a
one-time payment through any of your other accepted payment gateways!

Increased Control Over Taxable Items - Tax is now applied to each invoice
item rather than the invoice as a whole. This allows for a package to be charged
as taxable while allowing its package addons and domain to be optionally taxable.

2 Year Billing Cycles - As requested by many, two year billing cycles are now
available for packages and invoices!

Refund and Void Invoices - A client cancels their package however they still
have an active invoice for the package. No need to delete the invoice causing
gaps in your invoice numbers. Invoices can now be marked as refunded and
merchant account plugins will automatically refund the invoice amount back to the
customer credit card!

Override package prices for specific clients - Have a client that you wish to
give a discounted price for their package? With the upcoming 3.1 release of
ClientExec this is as easy as clicking a box and entering the new package price.

thermaldegree · 7th March 2008

WHMCS is good but, as Adam says, not the most polished thing ever.

I had no problems with it until yesterday, when it removed every hosting account and domain which wasn't associated with an order.

I was doing a bulk-delete of some orders and perhaps I didn't check any checkboxes one time, but the darn thing went ahead anyway and obviously because it wasn't working on an order, the hosting ID was '0'. Guess what value is used in the hosting table for any entries which don't have an associated order (ie - anything we'd manually imported from other systems)

I'll give you a clue - it's not NULL. That would be far too sensible.....

It went ahead and removed several hundred rows from the system.

Fortunately I had backups of course but - is it me or is this a basic coding error?! Slightly concerning.

Matt of course fixed the issue promptly, but even so I wasn't best pleased.

Is there *any* decent billing software out there which is coded by someone who *thoroughly* knows what they're doing?

If I had the time, or we had the resources, we'd create our own. But, like many other companies our size, and probably quite a few of you here, we just don't.

I should add that apart from this issue and other very minor things, it's a very good piece of software and Matt's always very helpful. It's just slightly alarming to see basic errors on a system which handles financial information.

Karl · 7th March 2008

All software unfortunately has bugs. Over the years, we've tested pretty much every single piece of billing software out there, and the majority of them are absolute junk, I'd say 99% of them to be honest. WHCMS seems to be the best of the bunch, by quite some margin.

othellotech · 7th March 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by thermaldegree

Is there *any* decent billing software out there which is coded by someone who *thoroughly* knows what they're doing?

Having tried them all, the simple answer is no, but then M$-Office is full of bugs, wind0ze crashes, I've known Oracle insert cr@p into the middle of a live database of 30 million records ...

There are still a lot of issues with WHMCS, but it was a good starting point, and we've had a lot of development work done to it over the last 18 months. We've stayed several versions behind as later ones have not passed our QA process, although 3.6 once the last few things I'm refixing in it are put back in by Matt will be the best version so far.

- anyway why are you deleting orders - thats your audit trail of what went on ?!?

thermaldegree · 7th March 2008

They were test / accidental orders

othellotech · 7th March 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by thermaldegree

They were test / accidental orders

If you were testing on your *LIVE* system .. then you deserve everything you get

thermaldegree · 7th March 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by othellotech

If you were testing on your *LIVE* system .. then you deserve everything you get

It wasn't me, it was a client who made duplicate orders by mistake. I logged in to delete them for him.

Btw, I'm Dominic on the WHMCS forums