Recurring Charges
Introduction
The Recurring Charges is an automated way to charge your customer for recurring services that do not require any additional overhead activities.
The Recurring Charges can be used to automatically charge customers for:
- monthly 365 subscriptions
- yearly domain renewals
- monthly hosting services
- yearly antivirus renewals
You can manage any number of recurring charges under each customer account.
Recurring Charges vs. Contracts and Contract-price Charges
In some case the new Recurring Charges feature may be used instead of Contracts and Contract-Price Charges.
Recurring Charges represent an alternative method to support automated recurring billing. They are easy to manage and track, and they are great when used for the correct use case.
When to use Recurring Charges and when to use Contracts?
Use Contracts with Contract-Price Charges in the following cases:
- When you need to track and limit time usage or total amount for the certain period (e.g. using the blocks of time or money).
- When your need to carefully decide what’s “covered” using Custom billing options as well as define billable-flag settings.
- When you need to assign tickets to specific billing arrangements (i.e. Contracts) and have special rates and prices.
- When the customer pays for a service agreement that additional activity may be reported on using labor, parts or expense charges.
Use Recurring Charges in the following cases:
- When the recurring charge at hand represents a granular service or product the customer pays for (e.g. domain name renewal or monthly hosting plan) unlike paying for an agreement or service contract that may cover additional activity logged by your team using charges.
- When the recurring charge at hand is not covered under the existing contract
Note: Customer may have Contracts running and Recurring Charges running. The two do not conflict and each offers its advantages depending on the case.
Setting up the Recurring Charges
Recurring Charges are automatically created by the 'CommitCRM Server' Windows service.
This Windows service must be installed on your server and must be running at all times in order for this feature to work.
If you already use the Email_Connector or Alerts_Server then you can skip this section as the CommitCRM Server service is already installed and there is nothing more you need to do besides defining the Recurring Charge Templates.
For installation instructions please review the Service Setup Guide.
Configuring a recurring Charge Template
Recurring charge templates can be managed using the main Charges window. You can also review customer specific templates under the customer Account Charges tab.
The recurring Charges are based on the templates that can be updated at any time and will affect the Charges created on the next cycle. In other words, you can change the quantities and/or price during the billing cycle, so next time a new Charge is scheduled to be created from the template, the new price/rate/quantity will apply.