>> We have several customers who want to be billed by Purchase Order.
>>
>> How can we bill these customers a MONTH prior to expiration (so they have
>> time to receive the bill, cut a check, and get it back to us before
>> expiration), but WITHOUT affecting credit card users, who it is ILLEGAL to
>> bill more than 3 days before their expiration date?
>
>Just put them down for renewal. A purchase order really isn't much
>different than a check, except its like an "I really owe you". :) The
>purchase order for Emerald was really designed for one time, not renewal.
This is BAD, Dale. When we host corporate web sites, many want to be
billed this way. If I do as you suggest, I have to mark the invoices as
"paid" before I even mail the invoice out, much less get a check -- and
they have net 15 to pay the bill. Thus, I need to invoice these customers
40 days prior to expiration, andI can't do that if they are set to Renewal,
because then my CREDIT CARD customers get invoiced 40 days prior to
expiration, too, and they throw fits (and billing more than 3 days prior to
the start of service is illegal, anyway).
Can we have a Purchase Order type billing, or a "bill in advance, x daya"
type setting? (Great, yet ANOTHER option to make it even more difficult to
bill, huh?)
>> It seems some credit card customers are showing up in the Invoice list as
>> "renewal" and that's munging it up.
>
>If you have a customer with CC selected and *NOT* auto-bill, Emerald
>will
>bit their credit card the *FIRST* time, and send renewals. Why you ask?
>Because you told Emerald *NOT* to automatically bill their credit card.
I don't have Auto-bill checked because our bank doesn't yet support
Soft*Deposit. I was under the impression that auto-bill was only for batch
imports and exports, and that if you left it unchecked, it generated
invoices and we did the billing one at a time, marking them paid when the
autorization comes through. If we check Auto-bill, it will auto-extend
their expiration date BEFORE we get an authorization, no? Or it will try
to do a batch out, no? Neither of which we can yet do....
>> WHY does billing have to be so DAMN complex? Why can't we have a single
>> button, that says "BILL". This button would do everything that "billing"
>> has been configured to do in advance. It would know that invoices/P.O.'s
>> were to be billed 40 days in advance, and credit cards 3 days, and would
>> just DO it. Why the multiple pass B.S.? We paid $3000 for this thing six
>> months ago and we *still* have to babysit each and every account by hand
>> because billing is just to complex for anyone to use -- and we're technical
>> people!
>
>Emerald 2.2 is working towards this. In the new version you will
>be able to specify how far in advance each customer should be
>billed.
Excellent. Again, we're willing to be guinea pigs on anything you've got
if you like -- we're classic examples of people you can test things on who
will tell you ALL kinds of ideas and ways to improve it. ;-)
>Emerald has TWO billing passes, renewal and Credit card.
But it is confusing renewal with credit cards. I marked the account as
credit card, but it is billing as a renewal. I think that's flawed, even
in llight of what you said about auto-bill. A credit card is a credit card
is a credit card, or it should be.
>This allows
>you
>to bill those two types when you want to, just like you are asking.
>Although
>its not yet a single push button, it does what you are asking already.
But if I read the docs correctly, this REQUIRES us to have Soft*Deposit or
another similar program working..... and our bank doesn't support it. They
use FDC, not VisaNet. What am I missing?
Thanks!