My company is currently making some changes to the way we work. You can always make improvements somewhere. For us, one of the area where we wanted to make changes was the automating of our hosting & domains billing / administration.
Company-wide we’re using OpenERP which is a good product, but for our Hosting & Domain department we have chosen to migrate to WHMCS. This is a tool especially built for “Hosters”. It allows you to automate most of the administrative tasks that come with hosting.
- It keeps track of domains / hosting about to expire
- It’ll automatically send a payment (renewal) invitation
- If the client pays (online) the system will mark their invoice as paid.
Once the system is setup, you basically only have to keep an eye on it, and make small updates when ready.
We’re hoping it will help us save some time. Our company doesn’t employ a dedicated administrative person. So every hour spent on billing clients, or reminding them to pay, could be better spent by the sales person / developer who’s doing the administration.
Sure, it might require a small investment of money and a bigger investment of time; but in the long run we’ll hopefully profit from the time / money spent. And if it encourages our clients to pay faster (which it will) then it’s a win-win situation! 😉