fed up designing a billing system

M

matthewventura

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Joined
Jul 1, 2004
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I'm fed up with the options out there for billing systems that are actually intuitive and make my job as a small/medium sized hosting company EASIER not harder.

CE has a good GUI but is counter intuitive and seems to make more work for me and doesnt even work for reseller accounts with DA.

MB is too expensive and doesnt support DA very much.

Since I make my living from software design for other people I am going to attempt to design my own billing solution.

Maybe I should give MB a better look but I just want something simple and effective that automates the job.

Can I get some feedback on what features you people would want in the software?

Would you prefer orders go straight through to live accounts or would you prefer some kind of human intervention between order and account setup?

Other issues?
 
I'm fed up with the options out there for billing systems that are actually intuitive and make my job as a small/medium sized hosting company EASIER not harder.
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I agree, we use MB and it's a pain in the butt sometimes and breaks frequently for some very odd reason. It's too expensive to buy and once you buy it, you have to renew your "support license" to get upgrades. Plus it has NO support for dedicated servers/colocation accounts.



Can I get some feedback on what features you people would want in the software?
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We would like to see the following in a billing system:

-Fully Compatible with DirectAdmin, adjusts, suspends, creates, and terminates accounts.

-Flat fee license with no charge for upgrading

-Fully automated billing compatible with major merchant systems.

-Domain management compatible with all the major domain registrars.

-Automated dedicated server setup, most of our servers are ready to go, but MB doesn't have a feature to send the ds information.

-Automated creation of accounts that score extremely low (or to a setting of our choosing), otherwise manual review.

-Ability to reboot your dedicated server.

Hopefully we will be making our own billing system soon as most on the market just don't cater to our needs. If you do decide to go forth and build the biling system for mass production, let us know!
 
Interesting thread; we've also started design work on a DA-centric billing/provisioning system.

quackweb, you make some interesting requests :) .

The most interesting being that you want all that at a flat fee with no upgrade charge.

So how do you expect anyone to make a living selling the product?

:confused:

Jeff
 
Haha, well DirectAdmin does it with it's lifetime license. I don't expect the license to be cheap by any means, especially if it does what we want. I'm just tired paying to get upgrades :D
 
If I do this I will make it to work with my setup first:

-authorize.net, paypal
-enom domains
-idevaffiliate

The plugins that CE uses for DA are very simple in comparison to their whole script and they just use a public DA script from some guy the netherlands.

Keep the features comming.

Does anyone want to split the dev costs?
 
pretty annoying from support:

In admin->settings->invoicing you can set the invoice offset to 15 days. You will need to login and click the generate invoices button in order for the invoices to be generated. There is no automatic invoice generation feature yet.

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wtf is a billing system good for if it doesn't do things automatically?
 
matthewventura,
While your making out your plans you might want to hold off just a little longer and see what's in store with MB v5. A beta is supposed to be released on the 16th.

So far it's looking promising with the new API centered design, but we'll see :)
 
I run a software design company. My team can build me a custom system with exactly what I need taking into consideration all the good and bad things in MB and CE and DA and what I want.

I've allready spent $$ on whois cart then CE.

CE is good it just misses the bill on what I want in terms of auto-pilot features.

I don't know about everyone else by my main money maker is software design and I just want the hosting part to be as painless and automated as possible.

Ive been talking with CE support and they keep telling me that I have to check boxes to ensure orders go through, approve them, generate invoices each month, about 1 min per order plus daily checking up for an hour after to make sure it worked on DA. With 1 min this means I have to spend 1 hour for every 60 orders. All because of fraud.

Where I come from the point that if I get a fraudulent order then I know I must be getting enough visibility and thats a good thing. I'll take $10 fraud out of every 100 orders since its less time to fix it. In 8 years of small scale hosting Ive never had a fraudulent order anyway.

So I am designing on the end of intuitive functions, ease of use, full features for DA, AUTOMATION.

If anyone wants they can help me pay the dev costs and get a copy for themselves with their own features.
 
That's exactly what we did ... I got tired of the packaged solutions out there, so we made our own, that fits OUR needs.

Good luck to ya!

Joe

PS: The authorize.net part may be the biggest hurdle for you to overcome. Keep in mind, they're not the only fish out there - Eprocessingnetwork.com is becoming a major player - and they have full recurring billing with their plans (at no extra charge)- it'll take some of the hassle away from your coding. It's available from CDGcommerce.com (tell em you want to setup with EPN)
 
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What I currently use is http://www.whoiscart.net/ and it works great for me. I only use it with paypal payments but it has ability to add credit cards and use different credit card gateways to charge it. It is also only a 1 time fee of like $30? Don't remember off top of my head but it was pretty cheap compared to others but works just as good. Just setup a cron job to hit the collector script every night and it will auto generate invoices, suspend/kill accounts after specified time limit on overdue accounts and has a pretty easy to use admin panel. They are also developing a new version called silverstar but I don't know when it is coming out as it has been in development for a while now. Can give it a shot and see if it works for you as well.
 
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matthewventura said:
sounds like everyone is putting advertisements in here?
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Advertisements? I just suggested an alternative to authorize.net - and one example of where to get service.

Mentioning whoiscart isn't an "advertisement" - the poster gets no financial gain from it, from what I can see
 
hostpc.com said:
Advertisements? I just suggested an alternative to authorize.net - and one example of where to get service.

Mentioning whoiscart isn't an "advertisement" - the poster gets no financial gain from it, from what I can see
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well, first i like to say takes money to make money.


I tried every other billing system ran into MB [ modernBill ] as me being a LLC for the state of california MB had everything i need to cover my taxes and hosting.

i say do it right the first time
 
I agree with the take money thing. I'm also an LLC.

What I mean by advertising is a guy with 4 posts who endorses a company.

It's not bad, I do that stuff too. I just want to get some serious feedback.

I'd rather develop my own solution if I'm going to pay another $500 to modern bill. Then I can do my own updates and have my own features.

Since I am a software dev firm I can do this and wanted to see if anyone wanted to split costs.
 
ubersmith

Look into ubersmith.com Modern Bill Stinks.

They are soon (if not already) offering a downloaded version.
 
Re: ubersmith

empoweri said:
Look into ubersmith.com Modern Bill Stinks.

They are soon (if not already) offering a downloaded version.
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Does it even work with DA?

11 posts and an advertisement?
 
matthewventura said:
I agree with the take money thing. I'm also an LLC.

What I mean by advertising is a guy with 4 posts who endorses a company.

It's not bad, I do that stuff too. I just want to get some serious feedback.

I'd rather develop my own solution if I'm going to pay another $500 to modern bill. Then I can do my own updates and have my own features.

Since I am a software dev firm I can do this and wanted to see if anyone wanted to split costs.
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well if is that good let me know :) $$$
 
So far all I've seen is a few recommendations for 3rd Party products; that's reasonable enough in the 3rd Party Software forum.

And a few people writing about what they're working on. That's also reasonable enough in the 3rd Party Software forum.

And when they're finished, if it works with DA, they can advertise it in the DirectAdmin-related Products and Services [Advertising Forum] forum.

All fairly reasonable to me, but if you have a problem with a specific post please report it by clicking on Report this post to a moderator, which is found at the bottom of every post.

Thanks!

Jeff
 
Does ubersmuth work with DA?

If they don't reply then its an advertisement most likely. It's just interesting to notice it. I'm not saying you should remove it, just making a note of it.
 
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