Retainer / Pre-Purchased Hours

[jvriends]

In addition the hosting / domains, I provide web design services to clients. Often times, clients will pre-buy 10 hours to receive a discount on the hourly fee. The issue I have is tracking this to ensure I am not billing them until their 10 hours expire.

 

Right now, I use a free web based system called Anuko Time Tracker to track time worked for clients and WHMCS to bill clients.

 

How are others doing this?

 

Are you using the project management module?

 

Are you creating support tickets with custom fields?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[itomic]

Sorry I'm not replying in order to help. Rather I'm replying to ask the same question, and a variation on the question...

 

Like jvriends, our clients purchase blocks of hours in advance - typically 10, 30, or 50 hours - for a discount on our standard hourly rates. So yes, know how others best incorporate this into WHMCS would be good.

 

That said, pre-paying for blocks of hours doesn't suit all customers (esp. the lower budget ones), so we're proposing to offer an alternative option: a monthly retainer. We're thinking either a fixed maximum amount of time per month, or a fixed number of support tickets per month. We're not sure which yet - pros and cons for either. Whichever we choose - we need WHMCS to help us - and therefore would really like to learn how others have streamlined the process - if you're prepared to share

 

Obviously setting up recurring payments in WHMCS is the easy bit. Rather it's about WHMCS helping us to quickly and easily know if someone has used up the terms of their retainer - time or # of tickets per time period.

 

Thanks,

 

Ross.