Blesta: Sensible Billing
Over the past year or so I’ve been trying multiple billing/management/ticket/auto-provisioning systems to try and find one that a) actually works and b) fits my needs. It’s been a struggle and I’ve been through ClientExec, Modern/Parallels Plesk Billing, WHMCS and others before stumbling upon Blesta.
Without going into great technicolour detail we required a simple system which allowed the client to provision a hosting account, bring their own domain (we currently don’t offer domain registration for various reasons), collect payment and then set-up the account on our servers and throw the client both billing and Plesk login details without any interaction from our side. Seems simple? Most systems make it like open heart surgery, with a million different options for every single step.
What a revelation Blesta was, billing done right. I’m not going to go into a hideously complex and detailed review mainly because I don’t have the time but suffice to say if you are on the look-out for a new billing system or are slowly starting to feel the need to throw your current one out of the window I’d encourage you to give Blesta a try.
We’ve currently got it running the Plesk module to auto-provision services while payments are processed by PayPal or offline (bank transfer, cheque etc.) depending on the client. It’s been incredibly easy to set-up, and the one support ticket that I dropped in was answered within a few minutes. At the moment it’s just doing hosting but billing and invoicing for service jobs shouldn’t be a problem either, and certainly well within it’s capabilities. A big plus for me is that Blesta actually uses the domain template packages on the Plesk server, and doesn’t require you to set limits within the actual billing software.
It’s not often I write nice things about billing systems, mainly because most of them are just epic amounts of fail and hideously complex to use. However, Blesta isn’t, so go and give it a try.
