Billing Overview

The first big challenge when setting up Back Office is deciding how you will bill your customers.  Back Office has features that support a variety of business models. Your task is to select which pieces of Back Office will fit your business the best. 

Note that you can use any combination of the features listed below.  Some sample implementions are listed at the end of this article.

 

Fees and payments

At the most basic level, billing in Main Street Sites is about posting fees to customer accounts and applying payments to those fees. 

There are lots of ways to do both of these things, as shown below.  It's very common for a Back Office customer to use several different ways to add fees to customer accounts and to post payments.

 

Posting fees to customer accounts

If we zoom in to the fee side of the above image, we can see the different options for posting fees described with additional detail: 

Most implementations of Back Office will use more than one of these options.  See the sample implementations listed below to get some ideas as to what might work best for you. 

You can learn more about each of these options by visiting the overviews for online registration, the online store, recurring rees, fee generation, and adding fees and credits. 

 

Applying payments to open fees

Once your customers have accumulated some unpaid fees in their accounts, it is likely that you'll want to be able to collect and record their payments.  Back Office provides several different ways of doing this, as shown here: 

To learn more about these options, see the overviews on online registration, the "Make Payment" page, adding payments, payment requests and payment batches.  Just as with posting fees, it is likely that you'll use several of these options to automate your business.

 

Sample Back Office implementations

 

Sample 1: A semester-based business that collects most tuitions at the time of registration

 

This business offers classes on a semester basis.  They will primarily take payments as part of online registration for their classes.  Online registration will post all of the necessary fees automatically.  The payments will either be posted as part of the registration process or added manually after registration (if the customer pays in person by check).  Note that online registration supports an optional "Pay Later" feature that can allow customers to register without paying upfront.

 

Sample 2:   a business with online registration and monthly billing 

This business has decided to use recurring fees to post a monthly fee into customer accounts.  Once a customer registers for class online, a recurring fee is created for that customer's account. The recurring fee can be created for a particular time period or it can be an ongoing fee the continues until canceled.

Payments are being collect during online registration and then later by sending our payment requests. Customers click on a link in the payment request email to make an online payment for the payment request amount.

Payment requests are a good option for Back Office customers using PayPal because PayPal doesn't support the payment batches feature.

 

Sample 3: a business with monthly fees and automated monthly payments

This Back Office customer is using fee generation to post tuition fees each month.  The various tuition fees are entered for each class and then posted for each student enrolled in those classes.  Discounts (if any) can be calculated and applied automatically during fee generation.

Payments are processed each month using payment batches.  Payment batches can automatically run payments for all accounts with open balances.  This requires your customers to store a saved payment method in their accounts (like a saved credit card or bank transfer information).  This customer also enters payments manually on occasion.

 

Sample 4: a mixed approach

It's not uncommon for customers to use multiple approaches to generating fees and payments.  This customer is posting fees during online registration and also generating fees each month using fee generation.  Payments are being collected during online registration, via payment batches and also posted manually.

Online registration can be configured to require customers to provide a saved credit card or EFT information at the time of registration. This can help get customers set up for monthly payment batches.