Client Management & Billing

[twopooches]

I am trying to locate an affordable and easy to use program that will automate my client accounts. Primarily I forget to bill my clients when their accounts (Hosting & maintenance) are due. Most are on PayPal subscriptions but get upset if they are not reminded before PayPal processes the subscription. Because of this they cancel the PayPal subscription and ask to be billed by invoice. Most programs I have looked at are either to expensive or to complicated. I have all my accounts on file but I need something that will remind my clients by email and remind me. I have used vinade reminder but I cannot keep suitable information on file with it.

[Orion]

I'm in the same situation sometimes lol... it's between forgetting or getting too many to bill so it takes a week to do it!

The only one I've come up with so far (haven't implemented yet) is modern bill... again stuck between going for it or holding off and waiting as Plesk's parent company bought it recently and Plesk 9 will have it integrated... but no clue when that will be out lol...

Anyone have any other good simple solutions? I'd love to know too!

[advancedmerchant]

Tough to do without a shameless plug... Get a merchant account with a recurring billing option. By charging their credit card, if they forget the bill is due, and the charge goes through automatically, they can make payments on their card accordingly. This lets you get your funds on time each and every month, and gives the customer flexibility to make payments. Just let your customers know to use a CREDIT Card rather than a DEBIT card, so the funds will be properly financed, rather than deducted from their cash flow.

[Mysti]

Why not use an accounting software such as Quickbooks? We manage everything in quickbooks, with a merchant account that allows for automated credit card billing, emailed invoices, and online bill pay. The clients seem to love and it makes for much less paperwork hassle!

[gelcreative]

Same here. It's domain name renewal reminders that I have trouble with. I am trying my hardest to diarise them one year in advance, but in the case of a .co.uk which needs renewing once every two years, I tend to have forgotten about it by the time it comes round!

I've got it stored on Excel at the moment, but that's got zero functionality for reminders etc.!

[Orion]

Originally Posted by Mysti

Why not use an accounting software such as Quickbooks? We manage everything in quickbooks, with a merchant account that allows for automated credit card billing, emailed invoices, and online bill pay. The clients seem to love and it makes for much less paperwork hassle!

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 ..

[visio]

I have exactly the opposite problem, my customers when they receive an invoice go and create another paypal subscription.... I had to cancel the recurring invoices.
For billing software I use account lab plus, $45.00 initially and then $15.00 a year, it is the most affordable billing software for hosting.
netenberg.com || creating possibilities from the same people who made fantastico de luxe.

[slipchuk]

Check out time.onrails.org for project tracking and blinksale.com for billing. These two sites are Free to sign-up and has real nice functionality and integration for client time tracking and billing.

time.onrails.org... Great for separating projects and running a simple punch clock which you can export out or link data to blinksale.com.

blinksale.com... has just those features you are looking for plus the ability to adjust and customize for both product and service billing.

BTW: I wouldn't suggest it for large scale of clients or complex projects for the obvious reasons although I am sure you can and other do.

The best part is its FREE! Anyways, check it out... enjoy.

[SemAdvance]

You can use Google Calendar to manage your payment and reporting schedules.

It allows you to set up an event.

Calendar also allows you to set events to occur each month, and it will send you reminders via pop up or e-mail with various time frames of those events.

It really is a full featured time management assistant and personal reminder system!!

Plus you cant beat the free aspect!

[gleames]

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

[Mysti]

Originally Posted by Orion

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]

Originally Posted by gleames

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

[seoprodigy]

Does anybody know how to automatically bill somebody via wire transfer? I use quickbooks for auto CC billing, which has worked fine. The only problem is that my merchant account is dinging me everytime for the transfer of funds.

[morestar]

ok I've posted a link where you can purchase my excel billing time clock. You'll love it! heh, i know I do!It's not a full-featured billing program or anything but for those that just want to be able to log time for clients work then it's perfectly simple.