Client Management & Billing

[Mysti]

LOL we do use quickbooks but takes a week to go through and invoice everyone every month.. can be a nightmare, the automated route is the way to go for sure... when you get over a couple hundred clients, and new ones coming on a few a day at that point it becomes hell to manage with just quickbooks and you need the automation...

oh.. of course I'm assuming we're talking one or two people operations it's not too bad i fyou have a full time book keeper and someone to handle just setting up new accounts on the server and someone else for sales and then there's service too ..

We manage it with over 300 hundred monthly clients.. and no full time bookkeeper. Yes, it takes some time.. but doesn't everything that we do everyday??? We set up automatic invoicing for every monthly customer and set to email out automatically once the invoice is generated. The ones who are on recurring CC payments get charged and we get notified. The only accounts that take excessive time are manual printed and mailed clients that don't use CC's.. which we make sure are few and far between by offering incentives for auto CC billing.

[a53mp]

I highly recommend https://53mp.billingarm.com/signup/ (FreshBooks - Online Invoicing, Time Tracking and Expense Service) to all of my clients who are in need of billing services. As a programmer I was thinking about creating my own, and also looked into 3rd party scripts that can handle billing, invoices, files, clients, etc...but did not find any.. I ended up stumbling across freshbooks and have been with them since. Accounts are free to start, and they are always adding new features, listens to advice and recommendations, and has one of the best customer supports I've come across.

They do regular invoicing online, mailed, export to quickbooks, even accept payments online through paypal, or any of the more popular merchants.
and lets you have staff, projects, timeclocks, assign clients to staff, invoice dispute, file transfer, and a lot more..
</plug>

but seriously.. check it out https://53mp.billingarm.com/signup/ it's completely free to start

edit: I just saw someone else recommended it as well

[southplatte]

Look into freshbooks, it's an online solution that looks promising - havent' had a chance to try it yet

I did a few things in freshbooks and it does seem nice - probably very worthy of looking into.

[zenfort]

I've been using ClientExec since they started (own license).
Flexible app that can be used for other billing purposes.
ClientExec - Overview


namaste

[songstershops]

I use Quickbooks as well.
I tried all kinds of different billing/payment solutions for my hosting clients and in the end I just put them all in Quickbooks. I run each of our online stores through Quickbooks so all my customers/clients are in one central place.

Set it up using the memorize transactions feature - you can select that the invoices are created X number of days before the payment is due. Then use the bulk email feature to send out the invoices so everyone is aware. On the due date process their payment from the CC information you have on file for them.

If you look after it everyday or every other day it works well.

Like I said, I've tried all kinds of software but the Quickbooks solution worked best for me.

[Tony_V]

The easiest, Cheapest (FREE) way to do it is...
use hotmail calendar... you can set up an email reminder to go out up to 7 days before paypal takes it's money,,, and don't quote me on this, but I am wondering if you can put more then one email in the email to get notified option? Maybe a comma after the first and add another will send a reminder to both emails? you will have to test that, but, worse case, you can create double, one for your client, then one seperate one for you.

just under the section that you put your email in to recieve the reminder, there is an option for recurring.
Set that to every 30 days, and dude, your good.

I have my clients all pay me around the same time, so I would only have to set myself up with one reminder, and then each of them set up to recieve their own reminder each month.

[tamecrow]

I had this problem and looked into it extensively. By FAR the greatest solution is Instant Invoice n Cashbook 2007. I've been using it for over a year now and it's flawless. It allows you to set repeat billing dates for each client and it'll automatically generate the invoice on that date and email it to the client. Highly recommended.

[gaz2373]

I use the quickbooks as well. I use the import fetaure to set up the accounts and then generate the sales receipt (self coded script in perl) which saves a lot of time. I then set the recurring billing option on reminder with bulk email as songstershops. On the sales receipt I have the payment to the paypal our credit card account (set up as bank accounts) where I import the statements from both pay pal and our card processor. It is then just a case of reconcilling the accounts. With this method I am able to process quite a few transactions every week but the reconciliation can take a while. I did try having them as invoices to start with and receiving the payments each time they hit the account, but with the volume of transactions going through this took forever.

[NvestWeb]

Don’t shortchange the solution that’s probably already on your Desktop; Microsoft Outlook. Most people don’t realize there is a time tracking built-in in the form of “Journal” (Depending on your version, it’s most often Contacts|Actions|New Journal entry). Each entry can have a user-prompted stopwatch keep track of the time; or, you can just enter it on your own. It can categorize the type of Activity, too, e.g., phone call, fax, document, etc. To do the roll-up of time, you can turn to the Activities tab in the Contact record, and select only “Journal”.

Additional features under the Contact tab system include being able to attach documents to a contact, categorize contacts into groups, etc. And, keeping track of everything within Outlook also brings into view any associated emails to this contact (Contacts|Activities|Email); this is the same as doing a search on emails but without having to use the search menus.

It’s not the level of a billing system similar to the responses above (we use QuickBooks for billing and Outlook for time tracking) but it can be a handy, all-in-one solution. You can assign reminder flags, too, to contacts, or emails.

Peter

Sales is more than just a numbers game...

[villageloop]

We are using Quickbooks already and have been adding new hosting (as well as other recurring billing, domain registrations, maintenance, etc...) invoices to our Memorized Transactions list.
This works fine at the moment, but I forsee running into an issue as our business grows.
The Memorized Transaction feature seems very limiting (no reports, minimal sorting options, etc...)
Groupings can only be done if they are on the exact same day, not by category (such as hosting).
You cant change the body of the invoice dynamically, such as "hosting for September 2008". Next month and every month moving forward the invoice will again say "Hosting for September 2008".
If I try to memorize the new invoice, it will create a new Memorized Transaction, rather than overwriting the existing one. It does this because I custom name my invoices so that I can group them together alphabetically (see Groupings above)
I am using QB2006.

Does anyone know if the newer versions have better control over the memorized transactions?

I have had a situation where I accidentally put in the next invoice date a year later (2009 instead of 2008 ). Since I still have controllable amount of transactions I was able to manually spot this error and correct it before I lost out on a year's worth of billing.
I wont be able to do this when I have several hundred (thousand hopefully ) transactions.
Does any have some advice for this?

Thanks