Wanted: Online Billing System

Looking for an invoicing system for a web design & hosting business.

[Rich]

Hello,

I have a small web design & hosting business I've started and I'm looking for an invoicing system.

This is what I'm looking for:

- Email invoices to customer, either text or html
- Online control panel for the customer, they should be able to view their invoices, both current and past.
- Customer can pay their invoice online with a credit card. (I supply my own merchant account & gateway.)
- Recurring billing for web host customers, with automatic invoice generation & credit card charge. (At least Monthly, Quarterly, Annually)
- Admin can manually create an invoice at any time
- Admin can manually credit/void/pay an invoice
- Customers sign up & open an account online. (So I don't have to create them manually!)

In a perfect world:

- Program sends formatted email to registrar to register new domains/transfers for web host customers.
- Late fee generation and emailed notices for non credit card customers.
- Support for PayPal payments if customer doesn't want to use a credit card.
- Affiliate/Referral commissions

Ok... so I know I'm asking a lot... but does anyone have any ideas? I've taken a look at DreamHost and it looks great - it can even register domains - but there is no support to manually invoice someone. They must login and purchase an item... it's not web designer friendly - but perfect for only web hosting.

Accounts Online is great - when you purchase the Auto Charge & Credit Card addons - but I think it only support ICVerify for processing credit cards.

The closest I've come so far is ModernBill - the invoice processing is not completely automatic but that's not too bad.

Any ideas? What are other people using?

Thank you!
Richard Arsenault

(edited by: engine at 1:54 pm (utc) on April 21, 2002)

[seofan]

Yes, that is asking quite a lot :) I haven't seen anything as comprehensive as this. Let us know what you find out in your searches - if you would please :)

I went to several major search engines and looked up "online invoicing" and "online invoicing services". There are more to choose from than you can shake a stick at.

[alex_cross]

Yahoo Store + www.HyperPenguin.com + Authorize.net + perfection. I would not build another online business without these three tools. Yahoo Stores are great. Did I mention it is the best thing I have come across on the web. If you are going to use ecommerce, use a Yahoo Store.

[caine]

Rich,

try actinic, i'm just getting it, looked the best of the bunch at a reasonable price.

I think the 'in a perfect world' part is a little more challenging.

When TT gets back he may have some idea's about this.

[alex_cross]

Yahoo SShopping will also generate 4-8 orders a day for your site, depending on what you sell.

[TallTroll]

Have you thought about approaching this from a novel angle and looking for an accounts package that will deal with your requirements?

There are some really quite advanced features starting to appear in even quite low-level sofware these days. The issue with that solution is usually bringing data into the accounts datafile, but there are a number of middleware solutions that coud handle that sort of thing.

Increasingly, accounts houses are also developing their own middleware apps, designed to bring in data from a 3rd party source, because integration is the big buzz in the accounts market at the moment.

>> Ok... so I know I'm asking a lot...

Yup :). You have some fairly sophisticated requirements here, which isn't a bad thing, but its going to take some fulfilling. The problem is that the market isn't very mature at the moment, so there ar every few clear needs/niches that have been clearly identified. Over time, that will change. I know that doesn't help you right now...

I'll have a think.