mlungu

Hi Cody I understand that Blesta is very customizable, and I have sent off a mail to the famous Eric around some ideas. The issue I have is that I cannot really test blesta until those features are there. Bit of a catch 22 situation. I think the statement feature is misunderstood, or at least I do not understand your description of it. We simply need the ability of sending a "statement of invoices and payments". Invariably a client will phone us and ask "how much do we owe you". They then request a listing of all invoices for X period, together with all payments made during that period. We'd then have the ability to generate this, usually with a few options like "included closed invoices, include payments, from-to dates, etc." We do currently try persuade our clients to log into their portal where they can see all that in our current solution, but most simply refuse to do this and we get asked "what kind of systems do you guys run that you cannot simply send us the statement". Old habits die hard. We are looking into blesta indeed for its ability to customise it, so all good there. But I am not a developer of any sorts and half the time have no idea what is involved in that and would need to first have a system that can do the basics, see if that works for us and THEN investigate the parts where we need custom development to tie it into our other platforms. I cannot really justify spending money on getting it to do those basics, work with it to see if it fits us, and then finding out about the rest. That said, Eric's rates are really reasonable so I will await feedback on that for now. Cheers

Hi Max and others Our requirements are similar to the European ones. I am starting to get the feeling that Blesta is too focussed on particular markets and not versatile enough to deal with the various environments, without having to first do a whole lot of custom development. I could be wrong on that score of course. I am really looking for a solution that has most of what is considered basic functionality in our environment buttoned down in its core. What attracted us is the api which we would need to interface with our voip platform (that part I don't mind developing as a plugin), but at this point it seems that we'd have to do a whole lot of work just to make it work for us. Any Blesta lovers who could tell me I am wrong in the above assumptions? Cheers

Hi Would that plugin be able to select only those clients that are indeed debit order ones, as well as collate the value of their outstanding invoices, and come to think of it, send an email with the total value of the debit order that will be run? I understand that with custom development "anything is possible", but cost would most likely be a major factor there? I often start getting palpations when I hear "it can be developed fairly cheaply" as the definition of affordability is different for some. Statements is simply a list of all invoices and payments, as well as a final balance for a particular client. It's customary here to send this to a customer and they forever request one. Nathan - you're having that developed, but the fact that it needed to be signed off means it's fairly involved? This is, at least in South Africa, the most basic of requirements of any invoicing system? May I ask you what sort of budget this entailed? Flangefrog - as for logging in - people simply won't. They want to receive the statement and that's it. Send them links and the effort is too much for them. In the meantime they will not pay their outstanding balance because we haven't sent them a statement. Tell them "but you have been sent all your invoices", it all means nothing, they want the statement :-( Cheers

Hi, Time runs away with me so I haven't had a look at blesta since my last questions. I have now installed it as a demo but have some basic functionality questions before I really spend time on trying it out. 1. A number of our clients have signed a debit order with us. This means we have their banking details and we debit their bank account on the 1st of the month automatically. For this, we need to be able to run a batch on the first which should spit out an XML file with the required information (company name, bank details, reference, sum of all outstanding invoices, etc. Can Blesta do this? Does it have fields to store the required information and can clients be "flagged" to be on a debit order so that when a batch is run it will simply do as above? 2. Can I run statements? For some reason this seems to allude me although admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time searching. Typically we would get a mail "Can you please send us a statement" which should include all invoices and payments made for X period. I don't mind spending some time figuring it all out, as long as I know it can do this. If anyone has some information on this, it would be much appreciated theo

Hi guys Always good to see such involvement from a community - instils confidence. Yes, that would do the trick. And I assume it would automatically put whatever excess in credit? Not really - in other systems where I have seen that work, it simply sends a reminder if any amount is outstanding for longer than x days since the last invoice date. Whatever the amount. 100% correct, with the additional issue of the credit card cost. When you run a business with 10% margins, paying 4% to mastercard/visa is not a real option!

Hi We're having a look at blesta. So far impressed with its look and initial ease of use. However, the most important feature we're looking for appears not to be there. I hope I am wrong though. Almost all of our payments are by means of EFT to us. When that payment comes in we process it manually (would love to automate that but you try and get a customer to use the correct reference..........). However, it seems like you have to process this against an invoice in Blesta. That's the precise reason we have started looking for another system. Clients typically lump together a number of invoices, or even worse pay us an arbitrary amount because they couldn't be bothered to check the exact amount they owe us. The amount paid could easily be more than what they owe us, or it could be less. Etc. We then have to manually figure out to which invoices this must be applied which is a nightmare. We want the ability to simply have a running total. Payments are applied against an account rather than against an invoice. That would cut out all the manual work we currently have to do. Am I correct that this is not possible with Blesta? If I am wrong, please let me know how to do this. If I am right - would it not make a lot more sense? Cheers Theo