Recurring Charges/Contracts - Again

[northwestmsp]

I need help making CommitCRM bend to my will here... I'll give you our scenarios and I would appreciate any/all feedback on how you're doing this, or what works for you:

Scenario A: Website Hosting

We manage and support a number of websites, and I want to use CommitCRM to solve two problems: 1) we need to bill the customer every year for the actual hosting service itself 2) we need a contract assigned to the account so we can track non-billable charges for support that's included for free in the website hosting package. This would be a really great example of being able to create "shared" contracts as we host many websites for many customers and they all have the exact same "plan".

Scenario B: SSL Certificates

Along with website hosting, Exchange servers, etc. we have SSL certificates that we charge our customers for. These renew annually and usually require billable installation fees on top of the SSL certificate cost. The cost of the certificate is the same for all customers and we need a way to track the anniversary because we have to generate a ticket to install the new certificate. These tickets would need to be generated the day BEFORE the certificate expires so the customer doesn't have an expired cert on their server.



We have many other annual/monthly/quarterly services that offer varying levels of included support, require tickets to be generated on their anniversary, etc. if we can solve the above issues I imagine the rest of our services would be able to also be handled.

Thanks for your time!

[aaspeer]

We actually use quickbooks for this specific task as CommitCRM does not do this. We created memorized invoices within quickbooks for all of our yearly charges like domain renewals, SSL certs and our monthly recurring invoices, and just note that it has been done within the CommitCRM account. It would be great to see CommitCRM handle recurring transactions, so that all billing could be handled within our CRM, since all labor, hardware and expense charges come from CommitCRM now.

Austin Speer
Onward IT Consultants

[lpopejoy]

Web hosting: create a "global" contract and add your web hosting charge to the "contract price charges". Set the date range for a year.

Ssl cert: either a contract like above or an assert. (I would personally use an asset for this and then run a report each month for expiring asserts)

Other services with regular charges: contracts with "contract price charges".

Look at activity templates. We don't use them - but they may be helpful for you with your scheduled services. I believe you can assign them to a cotract as well.

The "batch renew" and "batch complete" options under the contract menu is your friend! Run these once per month to renew expiring contracts and auto create the charges for the contracts with a few clicks.

[raymond]

What lpopejoy said although we may do it a little differently:

Scenario A (we do this for monthly recurring charges but it would work fine for yearly)
We create a special "recurring" ticket for each client with a monthly renewal date assigned to our bookkeeper employee account and set it to a status of RECURRING (we have carefully customized all the status names to match our workflow processes better). When the ticket is first created, any and all recurring charges go into the recurring ticket and are billed accordingly. After that, the ticket due date is set for the next month (all our monthly recurring charges are processed on the 15th). So then every month she checks all RECURRING tickets for ones that are due, reviews the charge(s) from the previous month, copies the charges and bills. She then sets the due date for the ticket out a month and the cycle repeats. This is actually pretty simple once the process is understood.

For the contract part of it, we set up two contracts (one for services that are included, one for services that are not...) and custom charges to bill accordingly -- this is where having custom contracts would be super helpful as we would like to have the former contract always mark charges as billable and the second contract always mark as unbillable.

Scenario B
We do the asset method for yearly recurring items...

//ray

[nattivillin]

We actually use memorized invoices as well. Either way for us it has to hit 2 systems so it doesn't save/waste any extra time.

I do like the idea of expiring assets...... Never thought about using it that way.

That's why i read even the things that don't seem to affect me!

[northwestmsp]

Thank you all for your very valuable input... Commit, any additional suggestions from you? At this point I'm still not happy/satisfied with the options as it requires to much additional leg work. You would think that something like this could be solved by better re-occurring ticket/contract management inCommitCRM. Any plans to the dev team?

[Support Team]

We believe that most options were already posted above by others, anyway as per your request here's our wrap up for this:

In general - the price of the plan should be represented by Contract-Price Charges, this is how Contracts are priced and then billed.

For Scenario A Website Hosting - you can create the first contract with price-charges that represent the cost for this service. Then you can just copy it to other customers (will save time on entering the same data) - in other words, you can use it as a template for others - yet - each customer probably has their own start/end dates of their hosting plan with you and copying it to each client provides you with a more granular control over it including when it comes to billing.

Once the Web Hosting Contract is about to expire you should renew it, either on a per contract or using the batch-renewal option. click to learn more about batch copy contracts to next period (this will also automatically apply the Contract-Price Charges).

For scenario B: The same principles as described for scenario A applies here (Contract-Price Charges, 'template' Contract to copy, annual renewal), yet, in addition you may also create and use Activity template for Contract and add a Ticket entry to be a part of the Activity Template. Linking the Contract to the Activity Template means that each time the Contract is renewed the Activity Template will be applied to the Contract automatically and this means that the Ticket will be created for it, as defined in the template.

Hope this helps.