What billing system are you using for your hosting business?

What billing system are you using for your hosting business?

  • A Plus Bill

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • ClientExec

    Votes: 8 26.7%

  • Modernbill

    Votes: 21 70.0%

  • PerlBill

    Votes: 1 3.3%
  • Total voters
    30
At the time we're using Client Exec, but I have to admit, it's one of the worst programs I've had to use so far.
It's totally not made for the Dutch market, we're just using it to create/send invoices, no one pays by credit card so far (note that we don't have a cc merchant account). But as an example: I've modified the included signup.php file to be able to run for a certain summer action we had, every time a new user signed up, it created an invoice. Worked great, although there was a little problem with the invoice, it's due on data would always be the same day as the signup, instead of giving 2 weeks to pay.

When I first bought the product it didn't have tax support, also some numbers that are needed to make a invoice valid here couldn't be placed on the invoice. Therefore I wrote an plugin that could generate invoices, but in the newer versions one can also e-mail the created invoice... Well, no way, didn't work with my plugin, you could say that's my problem. Which is true, but to correct it, I needed to have the name of a certain variable from the encoded part. Asked them, they replied it not being their problem...

Is this really something you would like to pay for ?

(note that their site is partially down at the moment)
 
RE: Billing Solution

I run a small web hosting company in Kentucky. We don't have many customers, so I haven't found a need to use an automated billing system.

We use PayPal for signups, rebills, etc. We have a customized PayPal form to include domain names, preferred passwords, etc.

I will also allow customers to mail their payments. For invoices, I use Invoice! 2002 which automatically emails invoices to users in PDF format. That way I save money from mailing out paper invoices, postage, etc.

John Wright
Johnsboro Online, Inc.
http://johnsboro.com
 
phpcoin

We're using phpcoin. No link to DA jet :( and still only made for webhosting. It has, email handling, invoicing, helpdesk, faq, and a small cms.

A new version is comming up with multi-order shopping cart and a lot more features, it's nice. :)

www.phpcoin.com

btw Instalatron is also providing this script.

Redeye
 
Re: DramsPlus

Blair said:
DramsPlus is not on the list. I have just finished setting up DA with DramsPlus and it seems to be an excellent combination of features and ease of customizing. The support is also quite good and they have an extensive forum. Before I used Drams I tried to get Whois cart setup. I was not happy with the support and found the product was worth the money as in you get what you pay for which is not much. Saving a couple hundred dollars is of no use if you lose loads of customers or waste hours of time trying to do things that are easily done in Drams.
Click to expand...

Blair,

Are you still using this product with DirectAdmin? Are you still impressed?

Can you tell me the good the bad and the ugly about this product? I have been looking at ModernBill, AgileBill and DRAMS Plus. Any help would be appreciated!
 
Another comment about DRAMS+

I can't tell you how many hours I have invested into the provided template structure that comes with Drams+. I can tell you that if you are going to use it, it helps to know PHP and it can be quite intensive if you are going to make some major mods.
Nonetheless, they continue to update the software with new features and they are doing a great job. It appears that DRAMS is only going to keep getting better and guess what? It is still fast! So, our vote is still DRAMS+. If you have not looked at it closely in the past month, it might be worth taking another look at.
 
does platypus link with directadmin out of the box or do you need to do custom programming?

I have whois cart but I need something that incorporates check payments, one time payments, and paypal... and I don't really understand whois cart at all... my brain works differently I guess.
 
Yes, but version 4 is buggy (not always compatible with PHP 5) and version 5 not ready for production yet.
Support wasn't too great 6 months ago, it may have improved.
 
jechilt said:
Another comment about DRAMS+

I can't tell you how many hours I have invested into the provided template structure that comes with Drams+. I can tell you that if you are going to use it, it helps to know PHP and it can be quite intensive if you are going to make some major mods.
Nonetheless, they continue to update the software with new features and they are doing a great job. It appears that DRAMS is only going to keep getting better and guess what? It is still fast! So, our vote is still DRAMS+. If you have not looked at it closely in the past month, it might be worth taking another look at.
Click to expand...


Can you post a link to this software please?

Nevermind.. Found it.. :) (http://www.awbs.com/)
 
Last edited:
I looked at drams and it seems the best out there... modernbill is way too hard to use and you have to take too many steps to do simple tasks like add a customer or even get to the page where you view your customer list.

how does drams handle these scenarios?

1) your customer goes on vacation for 5 months and you dont have your accounts set to turn off if they dont pay, they come back and you want to accept a SINGLE $50 payment for 10 different invoices, modernbill can not handle this and it just fails to register the bulk payment and your totals are off

2) you have customers not yet imported into any billing system that havnt paid for years for hosting and domains so I might want to send them a bill for 5 years of $10 domains ($50 total) as soon as they are entered into the billing system... can DRAMS handle this because modernbill cant.

is drams easy to use with a clean, uncluttered user/admin interface so I can easily find things?

I've got to tell you that I really believe modernbill was written with the intent to make people pay for support telephone calls at $150/hour and to pay for training (big bucks) because its been nothing but a headache for me and nearly everyone else I've asked who uses it... you can even see this in their own forums where everyone is complaining about it... we need to get John to write a billing system for directadmin in c++ !
 
jechilt said:
Another comment about DRAMS+

I can't tell you how many hours I have invested into the provided template structure that comes with Drams+. I can tell you that if you are going to use it, it helps to know PHP and it can be quite intensive if you are going to make some major mods.
Nonetheless, they continue to update the software with new features and they are doing a great job. It appears that DRAMS is only going to keep getting better and guess what? It is still fast! So, our vote is still DRAMS+. If you have not looked at it closely in the past month, it might be worth taking another look at.
Click to expand...

how is their support(DRAMS)? with modernbill I would ask one question then an answer to another question, sometimes they ignored my questions all together and just told me I was wrong. I hate modernbill.
 
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