small reseller seeks advice on hsphere / quickbooks

[bernie2]

Hi All

We're a small reseller of web hosting based in the uk. Our main area is web design, we do a little web hosting to our design clients and a few hosting only clients. We have about 50 odd accounts set up and would look to increase this maybe to 100-200 over the coming year, perhaps looking to more hosting only clients.

The control panel is HSphere. Billing wise, some clients pay through the billing section in hsphere, some find that a little confusing and we have setup a 'single' and 'recurring' payment page for the others. (using Futurepay, our merchant is Worldpay). The rest send us cheques.

Currently, for those that are not happy with the hsphere system I do HTML invoices and just mail them over. Many clients want to stay clear of hsphere.

We are beginning to suffer a bit not having an accounts system set up and we have recently purchased Quickbooks 2003 Regular.

I have searched the forum (and webhostingtalk) and either could not find what I was looking for or was confused. How do people suggest we tie Hsphere with Quickbooks? And I am completely new to accounting and quickbooks, in fact just got quickbooks yesterday afternoon.

I did read a post on webhostingtalk (and one at psoft.net) about adding one client to Quickbooks i.e. WebHosting and attribute all sales to it. (or indeed adding say 3 clients that reflect 3 different plans so some analysis can be done as to the most profitable plans etc). This is a good solution in that any payment i receive for hosting I can just lump into this - it seems quick and easy - especially for **** payments that come in from worldpay, not so good for cheques. I assume it can be lumped as sales so that invoices dont need to be created to tally up with any sales/income.

The main problem I see with this is that it does allow much detail and also a lot of my current clients want an invoice either emailed/or posted to them for their hosting. And with this system, how is this possible? They are not so keen on the hsphere invoice system.

Another post I read
In all likelihood you would probably have to have both an Accounting software and the billing solution. I am not aware of any billing solution that offers integration with an accounting software so the whole process becomes a royal pain. We use Hsphere control panel for billing purposes and Quickbooks for accounting. What we have to do is manually input all the billings generated by Hsphere manually into Quickbooks adjust muti-period transactions according to GAAP input our expenses and reconcile the bank. This can become a full time job when you start hitting 1000 customers mark.
I dont completely understand this, does this mean each account in hsphere will have its own client in quickbooks, whats GAAP?
This seems like the a more 'proper' way of doing things but it seems as though there would be repitition, admittedly we dont have that many accounts so....and also how well can Quickbooks handle recurring billing and what about little adjustments when people use extra resources etc?...saying that, hardly any go over allocated amounts

Would really appreciate anybodys thoughts - it looks like there are lots of experienced people in the forum and some who would have been in a similar position.

Thanks alot!

dom

[Chicken]

The one thing I'll just mention is that I know you just bought Quickbooks, and probably want to use it, but if it isn't the best solution, I wouldn't 'try to make it work' if it ends up being somethign that isn't the best solution for your needs.

[bernie2]

Thanks Chicken, good advice :)

[cbunting]

Hello bernie2,
We had bought quickbooks a while back as well but we soon found that it's wasn't what we needed.

Quickbooks is nice if you have time to keep it updated and time to learn it inside and out. The merchant account with Wells Fargo that you can get within the program offers some decent fees but over all, It's not yet meant for Web Hosting Companies.

You said you use worldpay. Quickbooks does offer automated billing and email invoicing to clients, but it only works if you have the quickbooks/wells fargo merchant account.

Overall, While it can be used for billing, it's just very time consuming. If you had a merchant account that had the Authorize.net gateway, I'd say to check out billingorchard.com as this is nice and simple to use. It does work with paypal other than authorize.net.

And yeah, We own a copy of modernbill as well but updating it and the slow loading times was a drag so it sits here with quickbooks.

My thoughts,
Chris Bunting

[alchiba]

I've used Quickbooks for a couple years (Wells Fargo w/recurring billing) and it's worked very well for me. What I like best about it is that my customer data isn't stored out on the 'net and is integrated with the company bank account. I really don't care that it isn't geared toward web hosting, it can be set up to keep all the information I need.

[ghpickjr]

We've used QuickBooks since the company was formed, and from a financial management standpoint, it has proved to be a great tool. Then we added the built in Wells Fargo merchant account and started doing e-invoices, again, this was great.

But as the hosting side of our business has grown, data entry for hosting accounts and billing has become much more time consuming. We are about to implement ModernBill, the upside is more automated provisioning and billing, but the downside is less detailed financial reporting withing QuickBooks unless I want to spend countless hours each week double entering transactions.

We are going to play around with QB import/export features and see if we can get something a bit more automated...I'll let you all know....

[Julie Dirks]

I am using Quickbook for a long time and it is very smart with every new
updates and easy available to find help