nzkiwi
Perch
With my old host provider, they billed most of the customers on my behalf and forwarded the total amount collected once per month minus their commission and fees. I billed a few clients directly. Some client use alternative hosts. The arrangement with my old provider is being terminated and the decision was made to go with Jodo.
My old host invoices clients paying by credit card or direct debit at the commencement of their billing period and debits their accounts 10 days later. Other clients are billed a month in advance. Obviously this will not work with Jodo.
I have limited time available to complete the transfers, while at the same time getting to understand how Jodo’s system works. The smaller clients will not need their own control panel as I do all their support so I will set them up under a single control panel and free plans and bill them independently of Jodo. For the rest, I want Jodo to take over the task.
How should I go about creating their accounts taking into consideration the fact that some clients are not billed in advance? Plan (A) is to proceed as follows:
Create a special paid plan just for existing clients with all billing set to zero. Create each account and set the billing date to match their current date. Post a “balance brought forward†based on their account from the old host provider or from my own billing system. Then set the appropriate Control Panel fee in the plan so that they will be invoiced from the next billing period. Monitor each account on the old provider for any payments received and post those manually into Jodo. (All accounts on the old provider have already been set to a monthly billing of zero so that there will be no new invoices created there.)
The only problem I can see is that for those customers paying by credit card or direct debit, will need to have an additional credit amount equal to a months hosting included in the “balance brought forwardâ€. Otherwise their account will be locked. I think this is something I am going to have to live with. Can any one suggest a better method?
The majority of my clients pay by cheque (no-one pays by “check†here
). The next most common payment method is direct credit, followed by direct debit. Only a handful pay by credit card. Unfortunately only 2 of the gateways available through Jodo can process transactions in NZ dollars and their fees would eat up most of the few credit card payments they would process. So it will be necessary to post all payments manually no matter how they are made. Options like PayPal are out, as they do not process NZ dollars.
It’ a pity, as one of the things that first attracted me to Jodo was the billing system and payment gateways. However, it has turned out to be less than ideal in my circumstances.
Plan (B) is to set the billing email address of all clients to a single mailbox under our host account. The contents of each email would be used to generate invoices that more closely matched those normally expected by NZ clients, and then either posted or emailed to the client. The problem here is that clients with control panel access could change the billing address so we would not receive the email which we would use as the trigger to process their invoice.
Plan (C) is to set all plans to free and invoice manually. This would mean that clients would not be permitted to adjust bandwidth, disk quota, features etc. They can’t with the old provider, but this ability for clients to make their onw changes was one of the attractions that lead me to Jodo, and I would like to take advantage of that.
Obviously the amount of work required increases from (A) through to (C), so plan (A) is the preferred choice. Can any one suggest any improvements? Anything to cut down on administrative work so I can spend more time on productive activities would be appreciated.
My old host invoices clients paying by credit card or direct debit at the commencement of their billing period and debits their accounts 10 days later. Other clients are billed a month in advance. Obviously this will not work with Jodo.
I have limited time available to complete the transfers, while at the same time getting to understand how Jodo’s system works. The smaller clients will not need their own control panel as I do all their support so I will set them up under a single control panel and free plans and bill them independently of Jodo. For the rest, I want Jodo to take over the task.
How should I go about creating their accounts taking into consideration the fact that some clients are not billed in advance? Plan (A) is to proceed as follows:
Create a special paid plan just for existing clients with all billing set to zero. Create each account and set the billing date to match their current date. Post a “balance brought forward†based on their account from the old host provider or from my own billing system. Then set the appropriate Control Panel fee in the plan so that they will be invoiced from the next billing period. Monitor each account on the old provider for any payments received and post those manually into Jodo. (All accounts on the old provider have already been set to a monthly billing of zero so that there will be no new invoices created there.)
The only problem I can see is that for those customers paying by credit card or direct debit, will need to have an additional credit amount equal to a months hosting included in the “balance brought forwardâ€. Otherwise their account will be locked. I think this is something I am going to have to live with. Can any one suggest a better method?
The majority of my clients pay by cheque (no-one pays by “check†here
). The next most common payment method is direct credit, followed by direct debit. Only a handful pay by credit card. Unfortunately only 2 of the gateways available through Jodo can process transactions in NZ dollars and their fees would eat up most of the few credit card payments they would process. So it will be necessary to post all payments manually no matter how they are made. Options like PayPal are out, as they do not process NZ dollars.It’ a pity, as one of the things that first attracted me to Jodo was the billing system and payment gateways. However, it has turned out to be less than ideal in my circumstances.
Plan (B) is to set the billing email address of all clients to a single mailbox under our host account. The contents of each email would be used to generate invoices that more closely matched those normally expected by NZ clients, and then either posted or emailed to the client. The problem here is that clients with control panel access could change the billing address so we would not receive the email which we would use as the trigger to process their invoice.
Plan (C) is to set all plans to free and invoice manually. This would mean that clients would not be permitted to adjust bandwidth, disk quota, features etc. They can’t with the old provider, but this ability for clients to make their onw changes was one of the attractions that lead me to Jodo, and I would like to take advantage of that.
Obviously the amount of work required increases from (A) through to (C), so plan (A) is the preferred choice. Can any one suggest any improvements? Anything to cut down on administrative work so I can spend more time on productive activities would be appreciated.