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Domain Manager - We need your feedback on domains


Paul

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We are in the process of fully spec'ing out the Domain Manager plugin for 4.1 and would love your feedback. I want to give you a basic overview of what we're considering for the Domain Manager, and get your feedback. We want to resolve the current issues and frustrations with how domains are currently handled. Please understand that the new domain system may not include everything in the first release, but our goal is to build the proper foundation so that it can easily be improved upon in the future.

What is the Domain Manager?

The Domain Manager is a plugin that will be responsible for all things domain related. Think of the Order System, and the Support Manager which cover all things related to orders, and support, respectively.

How will I define pricing?

A pricing grid will exist, likely under Domains > TLD Pricing where the price can be set for each TLD for 1 through 10 years for Register, Renew, and Transfer. This will provide a simple pricing grid, with different price options for Register, Renew, and Transfer. Additionally, special pricing can be set on a Client Group level, which will override the default pricing.

Additionally, domain extras like ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS Management will be options on a per-TLD basis and pricing can be set for these. The customer would be able to check if they want these options during checkout.

Question: Is it sufficient to have a single price of ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS Management for all TLDs, or would you want the ability to set a different price for these extra options on each TLD?

Are domains services?

This is a question that has resulted in much debate internally. My personal thoughts are that domains are very unique and do not easily fit with services. I am proposing that domains be treated completely separately from services. This means there would be a separate table in the database that stores domains and information unique to domains like: Domain Name, Registrar, Status, Date Registered, Date Expires, Management Features Available, Expiration/Renewal Reminders, Last Sync Date, and whether to Auto Renew or not.

If domains are not services, they will not be listed with services. For the Staff area, I propose a new Domains widget on client profile pages. For the client area, I propose a new primary nav link called Domains. The Domain Manager would be responsible for renewing domains, and invoicing for them and services and domains would not appear on the same invoices, even if they are billed on the same day.

Question: What are your thoughts on domains not being considered services?

What about email templates?

The domain manager would create several new email templates, likely to include the following: Domain Registration, Domain Transfer Initiated, Domain Transferred, Domain Renewed, Domain Expired, Domain Renewal Notice (domains listed are going to expire in the next x days).

What about automatic things?

The Domain Manager would be responsible for the following Automation Tasks:

  • Send expiration emails at the reminder intervals
  • Renew domains that are set to automatically renew
  • Synchronize renew dates with the registrar at a given interval

What about Registrar Modules?

The Domain Manager would implement its own module system, and existing registrar modules would not be compatible. The new registrar module system would be drop-in similar to the existing, but these would be enabled and configured under Domains > Registrars. New registrar modules would likely be more lightweight than current registrar modules as the plugin would implement the common features across registrars.

What management features would be available?

This will depend on the specific registrar module, but the following features would be supported:

  • Register, Transfer, Renew Domain (obviously) with Renew Domain being an option for Clients and Staff
  • Manage DNS for Domain (Get, Update DNS zone records if DNS hosted by registrar)
  • Manage Registrar Lock for Domain (Enable, Disable registrar lock)
  • Manage Email Forwarding for Domain
  • Manage ID Protection for domain (Enable, Disable ID Protection)
  • Manage Contacts for Domain Whois (Registrant, Admin, Tech)
  • Update Name Servers for Domain (Get Name Servers, Update Name Servers)
  • Register Name Servers (Unsupported by many registrars or not commonly done by average users, may be optional for first release)

What about existing registrar modules?

Existing registrar modules would be incompatible with the Domain Manager plugin. However, services using current domain registrar modules will continue to work as they do now.

Any bulk features?

We plan to have bulk features for both Staff and Clients. For Staff, under Domains > Browse Domains and under the Client Profile, Domains Widget. For Clients, under the Domains page. Bulk editing/tasks would work similar to selecting invoices for delivery with a checkbox on the left and some options to choose from like Renew Domain, Manage ID Protection, Domain Lock, Name Servers.

I'm certain I'm missing something, but wanted to give you a rough overview of what we are planning and get your feedback. Please let us know what you think! :blesta: 

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Question: Is it sufficient to have a single price of ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS Management for all TLDs, or would you want the ability to set a different price for these extra options on each TLD?

I prefer granularity where possible. There can be scenarios where those addons are more costly, depending on the TLD. It's also possible to have a special promotion to increase the awareness of a TLD, so X addon is free or something. I can't predict the future, but I'd prefer having the option built in if it meant nearly similar work hours are needed to do it, than not. I think the hardest part here is how you merge granularity with an easy to use interface. No one wants to enter pricing information 100 times. 

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Question: What are your thoughts on domains not being considered services?

Domains are definitely not like other services. At their core, sure, they're just another service. But all the big companies, and 20 years of domain registrations have trained people to see domains as their own type of service, and don't equate them to other types of services. Maybe it's because they're not paid monthly. Who knows. But the common perception is domains should be in their own area. There's a reason big companies also have them separated. Their internal focus groups told them this is the expected behaviour. 

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What about email templates?

This part can work the same. No need to re-invent the wheel on this. There's only so many actions you can take with domains, so they don't need a billion email templates. One for every action possible + expiry ones. That should be fine to start

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What about automatic things?

Good starting list. When a domain is about to expire, or expire, I'd like a ticket to be created with the customer too. At my old company, there were so many customers that did not understand why their domain expired. We're talking ~10-15 tickets like that daily (we had about 75k registered domains, and we weren't even a domains company). 

Also, if auto-renew is enabled, it should say that in the expiry notice. Or show that it's not if it's not enabled. There was so much confusion with that. 

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What about Registrar Modules?

I like this idea. A lot!! It would help the developer community. But please don't make the same mistakes again. Get the 4-5 biggest registrar modules done yourselves, or get one of the fantastic developers here to work with you in tandem, and buy their work and include it into Blesta. I won't tell you how to code or how to collaborate, but it's an idea to get core features people expect into their hands, without delaying development. Developers get paid, Blesta comes with better built-in features. 

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What management features would be available?

I think you included this with "transfer" but, the ability to send the EPP code to the customer so they can transfer out. That should be part of the module. The rest of what you listed will be okay for 99% of all customers, so good list :) 

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What about existing registrar modules?

Backwards compatibility is fantastic. Until it's not :) By that I mean, when you release something, keeping backwards compatibility is a must-have, or else you're disrupting business. But a way to migrate that data cleanly into the new module would be really really good to have too. Don't let this be a manual process if you can help it. Again, determine which modules people are using the most, work with the developers so a migration path can be planned. There aren't that many for Blesta, so this should be easy enough to figure out. 

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Any bulk features?

Any feature that's already possible at the single level. ID Protect, Renew, Transfer, Change Whois. others listed No reason to be selective here, the code is probably 95% built for the single functions anyway :) 

Of course, when domain prices go up,being able to bulk edit the pricing of a TLD would be nice too, and not have to edit over 30 boxes of prices (10 years, with 3 actions for each line) 

One neat feature would be you set your cost in Blesta, and then select what your margins are, and Blesta automatically updates everything when you enter a new cost.

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I'm certain I'm missing something, but wanted to give you a rough overview of what we are planning and get your feedback. Please let us know what you think!

Thanks! You got what should be good for 99% of most use cases. It's a good starting block. I'm sure there's other little things here and there, but for a first release, this is what I expect for basic functionality. There aren't a million things you can do with domains, so the hard part will be getting everything tied together for billing and automation. 

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Awesome, thanks for the feedback! Yes, EPP code request for bulk actions, forgot to mention that.

A question I forgot to ask, and maybe there will be varying opinions on this, but do you expect customers to be locked in to the same renew price? For example, if you update the renew price from say $14/year for .com to $15/year, should this apply to all renewals or only new customer renewals? I could be wrong, but in my research it seems as though most applications will charge the price in the price matrix and not lock the customer in. This is perhaps more often the case in the domain business because price hikes from ICANN or the TLD registries must be passed along due to thin margins.

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You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence. No one controls the pricing apart from ICANN and the TLD registries. It's also never been an expectation for customers to be locked into domain pricing.

If you really want a workaround to this, businesses can offer a coupon code / discount to bring the price back down. But it should be at their discretion. 

But in most common scenarios, price increases are passed on in the domain world. 

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3 minutes ago, naja7host said:

before i begin my request i need a reply for this questios .

what about the actual domains we have , will be listed/managed in the new domain manager ?

it will exist a importer or migrator for all the old domains to the new domain ?

 

 

By default no, existing domains would work as they do now. In terms of a migration utility, it's too early to say though that would definitely be a nice to have. With the domain sync option, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to migrate current domains, but I don't know what exactly would be involved in that yet. We will provide more information about this at a later time.

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1 hour ago, Paul said:

How will I define pricing?

A pricing grid will exist, likely under Domains > TLD Pricing where the price can be set for each TLD for 1 through 10 years for Register, Renew, and Transfer. This will provide a simple pricing grid, with different price options for Register, Renew, and Transfer. Additionally, special pricing can be set on a Client Group level, which will override the default pricing.

Additionally, domain extras like ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS Management will be options on a per-TLD basis and pricing can be set for these. The customer would be able to check if they want these options during checkout.

Question: Is it sufficient to have a single price of ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS Management for all TLDs, or would you want the ability to set a different price for these extra options on each TLD?

The grid sounds great. It would depend on others but I personally think you only need 1, 2, 3, 5 and 10 years. In our experience, it's very rare when anyone chooses the in between years. I really like the client group idea as well.

We would prefer individual pricing for each 'add on'. We charge for ID protect, we don't charge for DNS Management and we rarely sell Email Forwarding. I guess if you did group them all together, we'll make the pitch that we're giving more for less. There are also certain TLDs that come standard with ID protect so you would look like you're double charging if anyone is aware of how it works (from being with a previous registrar)

1 hour ago, Paul said:

What about email templates?

The domain manager would create several new email templates, likely to include the following: Domain Registration, Domain Transfer Initiated, Domain Transferred, Domain Renewed, Domain Expired, Domain Renewal Notice (domains listed are going to expire in the next x days).

What about automatic things?

The Domain Manager would be responsible for the following Automation Tasks:

  • Send expiration emails at the reminder intervals
  • Renew domains that are set to automatically renew
  • Synchronize renew dates with the registrar at a given interval

Is it possible to make these templates optional? Right now, Logicboxes automatically sends a white label email from their system to our clients for Domain Renewal Notices and we can't turn this off. If it was mandatory in Blesta, the client would receive 2 of these and become confused. The rest of the automation tasks are perfect.

 

One thing that is not mentioned and maybe this is just an API function:

Client has a domain at another registrar now without ID protect and it expires two years from now (as an example).

They order a transfer to us (as an example) and they now choose ID protect. Logicboxes will charge for 3 years of ID protect. Can the new domain plugin detect this and charge the client the right amount when they signup?

I don't use any other reseller so I can't speak to how they handle this.

 

Great start and I'm excited for it!

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4 minutes ago, Paul said:

By default no, existing domains would work as they do now. In terms of a migration utility, it's too early to say though that would definitely be a nice to have. With the domain sync option, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to migrate current domains, but I don't know what exactly would be involved in that yet. We will provide more information about this at a later time.

So based in your response, and what your have in your first post , it would be catastrophic (at least for me) to  make the new domain manager as plugin !!!!!

first , as a professional hosting company i can't give to my client interface that has option to manage domain after XXX date and another interface to manage thier old domain, simple no sense .

1 hour ago, Paul said:

The Domain Manager would be responsible for renewing domains, and invoicing for them and services and domains would not appear on the same invoices, even if they are billed on the same day.

another catastrophic  issue is to split hosting services from domains , the the hosters in this wourld offer hosting & domain , no sense to have to invoices for the bundle service , as some hosting plan has free domain ,how this will be handled .

for me is better to improve the packages to support some behaviors of domain , like multi pricing , free domain, free transfer, free domain just the first year . what i can think as a solution is the fallowing :

add new option in the module or in config json page called is_registrar , if set to true the module is a registrar .

in the packages system add new options to support the domain requirement, like multi pricing , free domains , free domain first year , ect ....

in the client area if you want to show a separate tab for just domain, make list just for the services that belong to modules that are registrar . 

renewing system is not a problem in the current system so i don't see a obstacle for it .

so for sync expiration date , the is problematic in the actual system , but i have already designed a shema solution for this to handle my requests , i have designed a new plugin called cron_hoster , this plugin will create a table for a custom crons , in the module in install procces , it will inject a line to this table , what we can store something like

cron_id (auto) , module (module directory) , interval (time)

the cron plugin will check this table , if is a time to run a plugin, it will load the module and execute the cron function , something like the lookup in the order form plugin .

 

1 hour ago, Paul said:

What management features would be available?

This will depend on the specific registrar module, but the following features would be supported:

  • Register, Transfer, Renew Domain (obviously) with Renew Domain being an option for Clients and Staff
  • Manage DNS for Domain (Get, Update DNS zone records if DNS hosted by registrar)
  • Manage Registrar Lock for Domain (Enable, Disable registrar lock)
  • Manage Email Forwarding for Domain
  • Manage ID Protection for domain (Enable, Disable ID Protection)
  • Manage Contacts for Domain Whois (Registrant, Admin, Tech)
  • Update Name Servers for Domain (Get Name Servers, Update Name Servers)
  • Register Name Servers (Unsupported by many registrars or not commonly done by average users, may be optional for first release)

all this feature can be done in the actual module system . 

1 hour ago, Paul said:

Any bulk features?

We plan to have bulk features for both Staff and Clients. For Staff, under Domains > Browse Domains and under the Client Profile, Domains Widget. For Clients, under the Domains page. Bulk editing/tasks would work similar to selecting invoices for delivery with a checkbox on the left and some options to choose from like Renew Domain, Manage ID Protection, Domain Lock, Name Servers.

this can be handled if we can separate services that use registrar module or not .

1 hour ago, Paul said:

What about email templates?

The domain manager would create several new email templates, likely to include the following: Domain Registration, Domain Transfer Initiated, Domain Transferred, Domain Renewed, Domain Expired, Domain Renewal Notice (domains listed are going to expire in the next x days).

What about automatic things?

The Domain Manager would be responsible for the following Automation Tasks:

  • Send expiration emails at the reminder intervals
  • Renew domains that are set to automatically renew
  • Synchronize renew dates with the registrar at a given interval

this feature is a obstacle for module, and i remember well i have already request modules to support email templates and cronjob .

and i feel you are selecting the plugin a solution just for this obstacle in the modules . for me improving the how the module work is better 100000% than creating a plugin , because all the other module will have more feature that are not exist just for this .

if is not possible to make module support cronjobs , email templates, send flash message to the view , is better to build a auxiliary plugins like cron_hosters , templates_hoster ect ....

 

 

 

 

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5 minutes ago, evolvewh said:

The grid sounds great. It would depend on others but I personally think you only need 1, 2, 3, 5 and 10 years. In our experience, it's very rare when anyone chooses the in between years. I really like the client group idea as well.

We would prefer individual pricing for each 'add on'. We charge for ID protect, we don't charge for DNS Management and we rarely sell Email Forwarding. I guess if you did group them all together, we'll make the pitch that we're giving more for less. There are also certain TLDs that come standard with ID protect so you would look like you're double charging if anyone is aware of how it works (from being with a previous registrar)

If you don't define a price for the other years, they won't be available to select. Still, it may be a good idea to define renew prices for those years even if you don't for new domains. If I have a domain that is paid up for 6 years, I might want to add 4 more to max it out.

8 minutes ago, evolvewh said:

Is it possible to make these templates optional? Right now, Logicboxes automatically sends a white label email from their system to our clients for Domain Renewal Notices and we can't turn this off. If it was mandatory in Blesta, the client would receive 2 of these and become confused. The rest of the automation tasks are perfect.

The templates would exist, however the way we are looking at it is that the reminder interval will be defined for each domain. This will be pulled in from somewhere, either by the module, or an option for the TLD. So, if there are no reminder intervals defined, no reminders will be sent.

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7 minutes ago, naja7host said:

So based in your response, and what your have in your first post , it would be catastrophic (at least for me) to  make the new domain manager as plugin !!!!!

first , as a professional hosting company i can't give to my client interface that has option to manage domain after XXX date and another interface to manage thier old domain, simple no sense .

I'm not saying there won't be some way to convert existing domains over, just that we have not considered that yet.

9 minutes ago, naja7host said:

another catastrophic  issue is to split hosting services from domains , the the hosters in this wourld offer hosting & domain , no sense to have to invoices for the bundle service , as some hosting plan has free domain ,how this will be handled .

for me is better to improve the packages to support some behaviors of domain , like multi pricing , free domain, free transfer, free domain just the first year . what i can think as a solution is the fallowing :

add new option in the module or in config json page called is_registrar , if set to true the module is a registrar .

in the packages system add new options to support the domain requirement, like multi pricing , free domains , free domain first year , ect

Thanks for your feedback, I'll look into seeing what would be necessary to combine invoices if we go with this method.

9 minutes ago, naja7host said:

renewing system is not a problem in the current system so i don't see a obstacle for it .

TLDs each have their own rules about when a domain should be renewed. This means that for people who bill for services 5 days in advance, this may be unacceptable for some of their domains. Additionally, Blesta services renew until cancelled. For domains, customers may want to disable auto renew and renew their domains manually, or add additional years. This makes forcing domains into services very difficult.

Do you see any problems with treating domains separate from services, other than importing existing domains into the new domain manager? If you can import them all over, does that solve the issue?

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if we import/convert  all the old domains to the new system this is a good point of start .

the other issue is the host+domain, all hosting company sell hosting with free domain or domain with price . so separate invoice is not acceptable solution here .

for the protect privacy is vary from registrar to registrar , and every registrar put a fixed amount to all available extension , so is not important to have price for every tld/cctld .

the another question is the order form . how it should be working with the new plugin ;

actually i have a custom order_type ( i will release it soon freely)  that handle the hosting market perfectly , an,d i have another helper plugin called free_domain_with , this plugin is triger the Invoice.add and when the invoice has (the package XXX with domain it convert the to domain price to 0 .also it support the case for multi domain) .

the renew system i never had a issue with it , as i have cron that cancel the service/invoice unpaid for XX days that belong to the registrar X . as you told some registrar has a custom renew , they may renew at the domain 1rst of the month , and other registrar renew the domain auto , and the reseller should disable renew manually from the domain manager .

and what about registrar , they will be as vendors/models ?!!!

finally , I'm not Enthusiastic to make the domain manager as plugin , but if he can do what it should no problem.

JUST a NOTE , try to test a roder system from other big companies, like goddady, hostpapa , hostgator, arvixe ...ect to see how the order pass and to take the logic of host+domain or just a domain .

 

if you are thinking in 4.1, that mean v4 is totally  near , we can see it last of this mounth ?

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9 minutes ago, naja7host said:

the other issue is the host+domain, all hosting company sell hosting with free domain or domain with price . so separate invoice is not acceptable solution here .

We are looking at a free domain option, it seems to be a very popular feature. Question about this for everyone. Do you offer just the first year free, or is it free as long as the hosting account is active? What are the requirements to get a free domain?

10 minutes ago, naja7host said:

for the protect privacy is vary from registrar to registrar , and every registrar put a fixed amount to all available extension , so is not important to have price for every tld/cctld .

We have it designed so that ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS management would be TLD independent.. but you could not charge more or less depending on Register, Renew, Transfer.

12 minutes ago, naja7host said:

the another question is the order form . how it should be working with the new plugin

We would have to create a new order form that works with the Domain Manager.

13 minutes ago, naja7host said:

actually i have a custom order_type ( i will release it soon freely)  that handle the hosting market perfectly , an,d i have another helper plugin called free_domain_with , this plugin is triger the Invoice.add and when the invoice has (the package XXX with domain it convert the to domain price to 0 .also it support the case for multi domain) .

the renew system i never had a issue with it , as i have cron that cancel the service/invoice unpaid for XX days that belong to the registrar X . as you told some registrar has a custom renew , they may renew at the domain 1rst of the month , and other registrar renew the domain auto , and the reseller should disable renew manually from the domain manager .

Awesome! :blesta: 

13 minutes ago, naja7host said:

if you are thinking in 4.1, that mean v4 is totally  near , we can see it last of this mounth ?

Yes, close. There are some issues with the minPHP 1.0 bridge that we have to resolve. Some issues were not readily apparent. A couple features are not quite going to be ready for Beta 1 but will come by Beta 2 or 3.

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We are looking at a free domain option, it seems to be a very popular feature. Question about this for everyone. Do you offer just the first year free, or is it free as long as the hosting account is active? What are the requirements to get a free domain?

That's like asking how long a ball of yarn is :) It depends on the margins of the business. If you're talking purely from a low margin hosting standpoint (most common), it's usually just the first year that's free. If you're talking higher scale, if you order a yearly plan with those companies, the domain is always free.

I'm not quite sure how I would code that in. I'm not a coder. But maybe multiple discount codes? One that expires after the first year, and one that's recurring? Then the billing will need to show which line item is being discounted / credited. 

Sorry, I don't have an easy answer how to implement this. Just sharing what i know within the hosting industry 

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6 minutes ago, AnthonyL said:

That's like asking how long a ball of yarn is :) It depends on the margins of the business. If you're talking purely from a low margin hosting standpoint (most common), it's usually just the first year that's free. If you're talking higher scale, if you order a yearly plan with those companies, the domain is always free.

I'm not quite sure how I would code that in. I'm not a coder. But maybe multiple discount codes? One that expires after the first year, and one that's recurring? Then the billing will need to show which line item is being discounted / credited. 

Sorry, I don't have an easy answer how to implement this. Just sharing what i know within the hosting industry 

both should be exist . i hve already impemented this as a plugin, now if the client has the package X with term Yearly and have also a domain invoiced together , the plugin convert the domain price to 0 . that way when the client pay the invoice , the system renew all related services .

for first year only , we have a coupon that is inject to the cart if the cart has the package XXX with term yearly .

 

 

 

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3 minutes ago, naja7host said:

both should be exist . i hve already impemented this as a plugin, now if the client has the package X with term Yearly and have also a domain invoiced together , the plugin convert the domain price to 0 . that way when the client pay the invoice , the system renew all related services .

for first year only , we have a coupon that is inject to the cart if the cart has the package XXX with term yearly .

 

 

 

does the customer see the domain being credited on their invoice? That's important :)

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1 hour ago, Paul said:

If you don't define a price for the other years, they won't be available to select. Still, it may be a good idea to define renew prices for those years even if you don't for new domains. If I have a domain that is paid up for 6 years, I might want to add 4 more to max it out.

Fair enough. I know registars typically let you 'transfer' for 1 year only and then you have to 'renew' for anything beyond that.

 

21 minutes ago, Paul said:

We have it designed so that ID Protect, Email Forwarding, and DNS management would be TLD independent.. but you could not charge more or less depending on Register, Renew, Transfer.

Since you're still planning, can you look further into the example I gave above about someone having a domain elsewhere, no privacy protection and a future expiration date? All registrars are going to lose a lot of money on this. I luckily caught it recently but I had a client who had a domain elsewhere with a renewal date of next year, no ID protect and she transferred to us with a 9 year renewal total and added ID protect. If I didn't catch it in time, we were out the cost of 8 years worth of ID protect.

 

25 minutes ago, Paul said:

We are looking at a free domain option, it seems to be a very popular feature. Question about this for everyone. Do you offer just the first year free, or is it free as long as the hosting account is active? What are the requirements to get a free domain?

I think it would be in your best interest to give the user to option to offer it for 1 year or as long as it's active and they can choose this package by package if they want to.

 

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and what about logs, a new log tab will be added to check registrar response ?

what about creation errors or suspending errors emails ? (a lot of registrar now support the suspend/unsuspend action)

how coupon will be applied to the new domains ?

my simple question is why not just improve the "Packages", "Services" and "Modules" to support new feature , rather than create a plugin that will cause a huge modification in other parts ?!!

 

 

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On 8/22/2016 at 5:41 PM, AnthonyL said:

so how does your accounting work? The domain costs you money, but Blesta is reporting it as being worth 0? 

Sorry guys for the tangent discussion! 

Accounting isn't handled by Blesta, it doesn't know how much the domain costs in the first place...so not sure how that's related at all.  Your cost of the domain should be included in your accounting software.

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40 minutes ago, AnthonyL said:

I'm confused. For my accounting, the billing software needs to show that 1 - the domain had X cost initially, and 2 - it was credited with X amount. 

It's not just about your cost :) both parts of that transaction should be shown. It's a paper trail. 

I'm not sure of any billing software that shows what your cost is initially...at least not the ones that only handle billing.  Accounting and Billing are two different things.  You get the cost of your domains from your domain provider, not your billing software.  Your domain cost comes from them, and your $0 charge for it is in the billing.  Both of those are then input into your accounting software and reconciled.

Paper trail is maintained, domain cost is on the invoice from your provider, your price is on the invoice to the customer.  I've never received a receipt with what it cost walmart for the toothbrush that I just bought on it.

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Oh, okay, we're talking about the same thing, but not voicing it the same way. I didn't phrase it correctly when i said cost to you. It's what you charge the customer, and then credit the customer. Your toothbrush example is exactly right. On the receipt, it'll show $2.00 for the toothbrush, and then -$2.00 for the credit. And then those transactions are placed in the accounting software to balance things out 

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8 minutes ago, AnthonyL said:

Oh, okay, we're talking about the same thing, but not voicing it the same way. I didn't phrase it correctly when i said cost to you. It's what you charge the customer, and then credit the customer. Your toothbrush example is exactly right. On the receipt, it'll show $2.00 for the toothbrush, and then -$2.00 for the credit. And then those transactions are placed in the accounting software to balance things out 

ah, gotcha.  Yeah, in that case I'd like that functionality as well :).

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