BILLmanager initial setup
From ISPWiki
With the billing system installed, you need to configure its main settings. The article below goes you through the steps you need to follow to start working in BILLmanager.
Contents |
1. Settings
The billing system comes with as wide range of options that you can use to manage your hosting services and user accounts. For example, you can provide Shared hosting services, sell dedicated servers or SSL certificates and much more. Go to the Features module to find a complete list of the billing features. To activate one you need, click the Enable button
. If you are not going to use some features, we recommend not activating them.
After you have activated the selected services, they will be displayed in the "Services" section. Some features will be shown in the corresponding modules. For example, if you activate "Create PDF", a new button allowing to print an invoice in the PDF format will be displayed in the customers' Payments module.
If you are going to provide services to customers from different countries or generate documents in multiple languages, you need to configure localizations.
Go to the Locale management module to click the "New" button
and fill out the form providing a locale's name, such as "Spanish". You also need to enter an ISO code corresponding to this language that will be used for integration of a newly created locale and customer's interface language. The name of a locale is only used in billing panel and your customers will not see it.
When providing services to clients you may need accounting documents, such as contracts, invoices and so on. You can create a document template not to create a new one every time you send it to you customers.
If you need to inform a customer about insufficient funds on his personal account or disk space threshold limit, go to the Email notifications module to activate
the ones that meet you business needs.
If you want to modify the text of a notification, go to the Message templates nodule, select the notification and modify it. Then you will need to check the result. Click the "Test" button
to view the notification that will be sent to your customers.
The billing system will automatically send notifications to the email address a customer provided in the General settings module.
2. Directory
The Directories section can be used to select parameters that you may need when working in BILLmanager.
If you are going to create multiple Companies to provide services to foreign customers, you will need different currencies. Go to the Currencies module to see a complete list and select ones you want to use.
When using multiple currencies (for example, for WMZ and WMR payments), set their Exchange rate. Select a required currency on the list, click the button
and fill out the form that will be displayed.
In the Units of measure module you can add units of measure that will be further used in the billing system for counting services that your customers order.
3. Integration
Servers are housed in data centers. Go to the Datacenter management module to click the "New" icon
and create a data center. For your convenience you may name them according to their geographic location, if your data centers are located in different cities or countries.
Then you add servers. You will be required to fill out the form providing a data center you have created above where you server will be housed, choose a control panel panel for managing this server, the maximum number of customers that can be located on this server, and other necessary parameters.
4. Provider
Before you start providing services to your customers you need to create Projects. Projects are web-sites of the hosting provider that list all information about services he offers. You may have multiple projects depending on the type of services, their prices, categories of customers and other parameters.
To add a project, click the "New" button
and fill out the form providing required information. Then you choose currency and payment methods that will be used for transactions and assign companies.
Go to the Companies module to create a new company or change properties of an existing one. A company in the billing system is a legal entity that is used to facilitate serving the customers (for example, you can create a company that will only provide services to clients from the United States). If you are running BILLmanager Corporate, you can assign your companies to the hosting projects.
For every country you can create payment methods, such as credit cards, wire transfer or Webmoney.
If needed, you can set up tax rates and special rules that will be applied when providing services to your customers. You can choose a customer status (individual, company or sole proprietor) and his country. For example you can set up the panel to only provide services to companies registered in Australia, or individuals from the United States and Canada.
Add administrators that will deal with clients' issues if they have problems in running their services or the billing panel. Click the "Privileges" button
to set privileges for the newly created administrator. This will enable you to choose the modules this administrator will have access to. For example, you can prevent your technical support staff from accessing the "Contracts", "Invoices" and other similar modules. You can also assign this administrator to a department.
5. Products
Go to the Products section to set up packages.
A service package determines the services you provide to your customers, including the prices for these services, their order periods and billing types. You can create multiple service packages that will vary depending on their cost, billing types and so on. You can choose add-ons and order periods (you can do so either when creating a package or later by selecting corresponding modules Order periods
and Package details
.
After you have created a package go to the Kinds of services module to add services, such as "Consulting services" or "Domain registration".
Go to the Item types module to add products and services that you want to sell to your clients. For their flexible configuration, specify their add-ons that include CPU, RAM, disk space, etc.
If you want to enable your customers to order additional services, you need to create enumeration and configure their parameters. For example, you may add an "Operating system" enumeration and split it into "FreeBSD", "Debian" или "Centos" allowing your customers to choose one they need.
Create a service agreement that your customers must read and accept when purchasing a service. During the order process, the client will be prompted to agree with the terms of the license agreement to be able to proceed with order.
Go to the Agreements to click the "New" button
and enter a text into the form. If you have configured locales to generate documents in different languages, you will be prompted to specify the text in selected languages.
6. Global settings
Once you have gone through the initial setup process, go to the Global settings module to change the settings to manage your services and customers.
You will see a form that consists of two tabs. The first tab called Policy enables you to set such actions as use unique email addresses only, verify domain contacts, allow users to delete automatically generated invoices and much more.
The second tab "Settings" enables you to choose your customer's statuses(individual, company or sole proprietor), set the number of ticket redirects among support departments, etc.
7.Billing security features
You may also want to set up billing security policy. For more information, please read the article Billing security features
