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pre-sales questions


medfusion

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Hi, I am trying to choose a billing software, and we have some very complicated recurring fees and cycles (we are not really a web hosting company, so that takes out most of the automation). I was wondering if I could get some questions answered. I looked at the documentation a bit, but couldn’t really get a full sense of what I needed to know. I was wondering if you could help me with a few questions.

 

1) prorating monthly fees: (how does it calculate this? Does it bill for the signup day? ex: if they signed up 1/17, would it calculate (31-17+1)/31 OR (31-17)/31?

 

2) Same for cancelling a recurring fee mid-cycle: does it bill for the termination date? For a termination date of 1/17, would it bill for 17/31 days, or 16/31 days? Would it issue a credit for the unused portion?

 

3) Also related to canceling mid-cycle: I can see from the documentation that when canceling a recurring fee, we can choose "either instant cancellation or at the end of the current billing cycle." Is there any way to input a date manually? We probably would need to terminate their service on some random day, and schedule the termination - which isn't website hosting, so it couldn't be automated anyway.

 

4) Billing in advance: I was a little unclear if it would generate an invoice in advance with the renewal date or would the invoice date be the date that was X days in advance. I am pretty sure it is the latter, but I just want to make sure. We currently bill one month in advance for our services, but are going to start billing two months in advance. Would this be a problem? ex: right now, an invoice dated 2/1/08 would cover 3/1/08 - 3/31/08, but in the future, it would cover 4/1/08 - 4/30/08. I see that we would choose “X # of days to bill in advance,” and if we chose 60, this does not really mean the first day of the month two months before, but might end up generating an invoice a few days before or after. Is there any way around this?

 

5) using with other accounting systems - What kind of fields can be exported in delimited format? We are using quickbooks right now, and I read in a post that there were fields that were required that were not available in reporting, but the poster never said what they were.

 

 

thanks,

Christina

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  • WHMCS CEO

In WHMCS with prorata billing, when a user places an order it will bill from the order date until the date you set to prorata to, so if that's the 1st of the month it would issue the first invoice for 22nd July until 31st July. Then invoice monthly starting on 1st August. You also have the option to set the first invoice to include the remainder of the month and the following month so you don't end up getting small amounts - in that case it would bill from 22nd July until 31st August, and then bill monthly starting 1st September.

 

Cancelling mid cycle does not give users a credit. Clients upgrading or downgrading can give them credit but not cancelling. There also isn't a way to specify a specific date other than end of the billing cycle for an auto termination.

 

You can bill as far in advance as you like. Billing 2 months before an item is due wouldn't be a problem.

 

Not sure on what fields are missing for your accounting program but a Quickbooks export function is something we're looking at developing - you can currently export a list of transactions from the WHMCS admin interface and can export anything from the DB directly through phpMyAdmin.

 

Matt

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Hi again - I would have edited the original post, but for some reason it wouldn't let me.

 

Looking at the demo some more, I am not sure that this product will work for us. We do sell websites, but that is really incidental. I need some way to bill one time fees and recurring fees that are not in any way tied to domains and servers. We don't really have standardized packages at all, and would want to just put different products on an invoice.

 

Basically, I guess a good question would be, would you recommend this system for billing daycare (obviously not what we sell, but it might as well be).

 

 

If you have a good answer to that, then can you also answer this:

Let's say I have a recurring fee that I should have started billing in February, but it's July and have just realized that it wasn't set set up right. Is there some way to put in the billing start date in Feb, have it prorate that month and bill for Feb - Aug (since we bill in advance) all on the same invoice (and automated).

 

thanks,

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