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Ability to sell services and have a billing system

Started by alexfuchs, February 23, 2012, 02:40:21 pm

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alexfuchs

Hello,

I am currently evaluating KonaKart, it seems very powerful and it looks like it could fit my needs, however I have a few questions.

What I want to do is to create an online platform to sell services to other companies, and not products, that's why I would like to get rid of the 'add-to-cart' approach for each item.

The system shall be able to support multiple pricing models, and the main idea is that a company could require as many services as they want, but would generally receive a bill for that only at the end of the month. I can see that KonaKart allows subscriptions and recurring billing, but that might not be exactly what I want. For example the kind of services required and the number of services required a given month can differ largely from the ones required another month, for the same company.

The system shall also have other specificities such as customer invoice management, bad debt management, a means to allocate a portion of billed revenue to third-party developers, etc.

What I have done so far is to install the community version and go through the API to see how it really works, and it appears that there is many different ways to control the application and customize it, and I have been lead to believe that I could use KonaKart API to develop my system. However for now I was only able to make minor changes and I can't really find information about how to do what I want to create.

If you think it's possible to do it with KonaKart, could you give me some pointers on how to achieve that?

Thank you very much for your assistance.

julie

Hi,

I have a few questions:

Are you metering the services? i.e. Based on a customer's usage, can you figure out how much they need to be billed? KK can store many different base prices for a service but since it doesn't know any specific details so you may need some custom code that takes usage information and base or unit price as input in order to calculate what needs to be billed.

How is the payment achieved? Does KK just have to generate the invoice or actually connect to a payment gateway to perform the transaction. If so, has the customer given his CC details?

Can you expand on what you require for bad debt management and how you plan to send a portion of billed revenue to the third-party developers? Who are the third party developers?

With some more detailed information I should be able to give you a better answer. 

alexfuchs

Hi,
here is more information about what we want to do:
QuoteAre you metering the services? i.e. Based on a customer's usage, can you figure out how much they need to be billed? KK can store many different base prices for a service but since it doesn't know any specific details so you may need some custom code that takes usage information and base or unit price as input in order to calculate what needs to be billed.

Yes, we will be metering the services and record usage, and some of the billing will depend on this. But it sounds like with the API, this will be feasible.
QuoteHow is the payment achieved? Does KK just have to generate the invoice or actually connect to a payment gateway to perform the transaction. If so, has the customer given his CC details?

Payment might happen via an invoice or a credit card. So we would like to support both.
Hi,
here is more information about what we want to do:

QuoteCan you expand on what you require for bad debt management and how you plan to send a portion of billed revenue to the third-party developers? Who are the third party developers?


Bad Dept Management: There shall be a way to enable an option for users to pay in increments. Let's say a bill is due, but the user is not able to pay. An administrator should be able to set an option to break up the bill over X number of month.

There shall be an option to run a report on all charges billed for one single service (which will be a sum of all charges from multiple users of that service). And then, we would like to be able to issue a payment to a developer who created this service.

Will it be possible to issue payments with this billing system? I think the rest would be something we could custom program (run a report on a single service, apply some rule and issue the payment).

julie

QuoteYes, we will be metering the services and record usage, and some of the billing will depend on this. But it sounds like with the API, this will be feasible.


Maybe the way to do it is to store the base price(s) in KK (could be multiple catalogs) and then to generate an order on a calculated price which is some multiple of the base price determined by the usage.

QuotePayment might happen via an invoice or a credit card. So we would like to support both.


Invoice is fine. Credit card requires setting up recurring billing. There are less security restrictions if you choose a payment gateway that supports recurring billing. KonaKart (through the payment module) can communicate with the gateway to start the recurring billing process without ever having to store the credit card details in the KK database.

QuoteBad Dept Management: There shall be a way to enable an option for users to pay in increments. Let's say a bill is due, but the user is not able to pay. An administrator should be able to set an option to break up the bill over X number of month.


This isn't something out of the box, but with a bit of custom code using the APIs it should be feasible to create new orders and invoices based on a previous order.