How do you manage whmcs with accounting?

[A320guy]

I've been a whmcs customer in the past and I am familiar. I have a new need to use it again but I need to figure out how best to run it side by side with quickbooks.

 

I'm not asking for a module or anything, I know there is nothing production yet.

 

I'm asking for someone familiar to explain how they run their accounting, just a description.

 

Here is how I think I could run this, but wanted some feedback.

 

I would use whmcs to send out my monthly bills which have nothing to do with hosting, but are relevant to managed services such as voip and bandwidth monitoring.

 

I would also use whmcs to handle my ticketing, I like the interface and think it is a plus.

 

So, when the money comes in my snailmail box in the form of a check, do I just make a double entry? One in quickbooks where there is no invoice, will have to just make an entry right to the bank account and then make another entry in whmcs to say the bill is paid? Does that sound right?

 

-or-

 

Do you just make the entry in whmcs and then export from whmcs and import into quickbooks, is this possible? If it is, can I only run the import once per period? If I run it more than once per period, will it make an incorrect double entry in quickbooks? For example, customer A's bill is due on the 10th of the month and customer Bs bill is due on the 20th.

 

I run the import on the 10th to get customer A's billing into quickbooks, if I run it again on the 20th to capture customer B, will it also write customer A a second time improperly if I accidentally overlap a date?

 

Also, can someone speak to hourly billing? I have 2 types.

 

1.) The customer buys a block of hours up front at a discount. How best to track the hours the customer is consuming?

 

2.) I bill the customer at the end of the month for any hours consumed. Again how to track? Also, can an invoice be sent out automatically for this?

 

Thanks for feedback on how you run your system, it is appreciated.

 

Tom

[RikeMedia]

So, when the money comes in my snailmail box in the form of a check, do I just make a double entry? One in quickbooks where there is no invoice, will have to just make an entry right to the bank account and then make another entry in whmcs to say the bill is paid? Does that sound right?

 

-or-

 

Do you just make the entry in whmcs and then export from whmcs and import into quickbooks, is this possible? If it is, can I only run the import once per period? If I run it more than once per period, will it make an incorrect double entry in quickbooks? For example, customer A's bill is due on the 10th of the month and customer Bs bill is due on the 20th.

 

I run the import on the 10th to get customer A's billing into quickbooks, if I run it again on the 20th to capture customer B, will it also write customer A a second time improperly if I accidentally overlap a date?

 

Also really want to know about this. How do others handle WHMCS <=> Quickbooks?

[Cape Dave]

Yes, this would be very interesting know.

[SingleOS]

I also think that it would be nice to have it, but from an accounting perspective it will automate bookkeeping only if the WHMCS user accepts/accounts all the transactions (even direct payments to bank account) though WHMCS.

[virgil]

I have posed questions around this issue in other threads on this forum, but have yet to get a practical answer.

 

For any business, the ability to account for any financial transaction is absolutely critical, yet there is precious little detail on how transactions can be migrated from WHMCS to a third party accounting package without having to go through some kind of translation process first.

 

I know about Consolibytes, but their solution is hosted and only suitable fro businesses outside the EU.

 

I think WHMCS is a really good solution for handling the front of house customer interaction and recurring billing, but at this point I can't see a way of making this work in our business without doubling the accounting admin workload.

 

I'm sure I am missing a very important point here and that there must be a feature in the software that I'm unaware of that makes integration with Sage or Quickbooks easy.

 

It would do us potential new customers a really great service if members could share their experiences and methods they have adopted to bridge the gap between their accounting and WHMCS please.

[Corneliu]

Guys,

You might want to checkout OneSaas (http://www.onesaas.com).

We have a cloud base integration between WHMCS and Saasu (http://www.saasu.com) and Xero (http://www.xero.com) two of the best online accounting systems.

http://www.onesaas.com/integrate/whmcs

 

We can automatically read all the invoices from WHMCS and transform them and push them into the accounting system all coded in the correct accounts and with the correct tax information and tax codes.

 

Give it a try. You might need some advice from your accountant regarding how to properly configure your accounting system but we can help you setup the automatic link between WHMCS and your accounting.

 

Regards,

Corneliu

[virgil]

Guys,

You might want to checkout OneSaas (http://www.onesaas.com).

We have a cloud base integration between WHMCS and Saasu (http://www.saasu.com) and Xero (http://www.xero.com) two of the best online accounting systems.

http://www.onesaas.com/integrate/whmcs

 

We can automatically read all the invoices from WHMCS and transform them and push them into the accounting system all coded in the correct accounts and with the correct tax information and tax codes.

 

Give it a try. You might need some advice from your accountant regarding how to properly configure your accounting system but we can help you setup the automatic link between WHMCS and your accounting.

 

Regards,

Corneliu

 

Sorry Corneliu, you're outside the EU, so this won't work for us. Nice website though.

[MACscr]

Sorry Corneliu, you're outside the EU, so this won't work for us. Nice website though.

 

Im from the US, so call my naive, but why does that make a difference?

[virgil]

Im from the US, so call my naive, but why does that make a difference?

 

We have very strict data protection laws in Europe that forbid information that can be used to identify an individual being transferred outside the EU even if it is encrypted.

 

There are a couple of ways around this, neither of which are satisfactory. The first is that the individual's express consent has to be obtained; the second is to work within the framework of a Safe Harbor agreement. The latter option works well if the information being transferred relates to employees in your company, but is very flimsy when it relates to third parties.

 

In summary, although many European companies still use US companies to store personal information about their clients, they are breaking the law; but ignorance is no defence.

[MACscr]

ha, thats funny. Another stupid EU policy.

[virgil]

ha, thats funny. Another stupid EU policy.

 

I disagree. It's quite the opposite. In a world where our rights to privacy are being constantly undermined, and the Internet is the modern equivalent of the Wild West, laws to protect the individual are important.

 

I am pleased that I live in a community that takes my rights to privacy seriously and legislates to protect them.

[MACscr]

I disagree. It's quite the opposite. In a world where our rights to privacy are being constantly undermined, and the Internet is the modern equivalent of the Wild West, laws to protect the individual are important.

 

I am pleased that I live in a community that takes my rights to privacy seriously and legislates to protect them.

 

Geography has nothing to do with it. Your privacy could easily be just as violated next door and is actually more likely. I completely understand where your coming from, i just think their solution is ignorant.

[NorCal Internet]

Not sure if this resolves the OP's issue or not, but for years, even with other billing applications, I've never really cared about the ability to export each transaction from the *billing* software into the *accounting* software.

 

For us, I've always simply printed end of month type reports, by product type, and done manual entries into the accounting software. I've recently changed to just creating a single transaction, "Internet Services", that combines all transactions from WHMCS into one transaction... That's all I need to know for accounting is how much I brought in...Not what each one was... The customer information isn't important to us, in our accounting process...

 

I also wrote a script that takes my transaction export from my merchant account and combines it all into one transaction that I import into Quickbooks. This script keeps track of the charges the merchant takes so that those can be entered as a split transaction for tax purposes.

 

So, now, I take the sum of all non-credit card transaction from WHMCS, enter that, then take credit card transaction exported from my merchant, run the script on it to combine them into one transaction and import it. Two line items a month in Quickbooks.

 

This keeps Quickbooks clean as far as the number of clients... I let WHMCS handle the billing, and just use Quickbooks for tracking the total income/outgo. I do bill other services directly from Quickbooks, but those aren't related to anything done via WHMCS.

[stirton]

We use a daily cron task to push paid invoices across to our Kashflow (- Removed -) account.

 

Works pretty well, just keep an eye on the activity log to make sure there are no errors showing.

Edited October 23, 2015 by Infopro
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[virgil]

Thanks Norcal Internet,

 

That option makes a lot of sense and does simplify the integration. I think that might prove to be a good way forward for us.

 

Thanks to everyone for your comments so far.

[Corneliu]

Hi Virgil,

Would you use OneSaas if we would deploy in Europe?

We have a large number of European customers already but we were nevere aware of those laws. If you contact me (corneliu at onesaas.com) with some details/links about the laws we'll look into deploying an instance in Europe.

 

Regards,

Corneliu