Adding Credits and Adjusting Balance
In the client view, click on the billing tab. Here you can manually add credits. We will add 15.00 to our clients credit balance.
Now that our client has a credit balance of 15.00 , when the next invoice is generated it will automatically apply the credit and mark the invoice paid. If the credit balance is not sufficient to clear the invoice, then it will apply the credit and invoice the client for the remaining amount.
Applying a credit manually
On many occasions you will want to apply a credit to a specific product or invoice, you can easily do this manually.
Open the invoices tab and select the invoice that you wish to apply the credit to. Clicking on the payment button now allows you to “apply credit”. A further description is added to the invoice for added credit and the remainging blance is then shown – just as the below picture shows.
No more daily status reports
If your team is like ours, spread across the world, then getting good statuses is as important to your success as it is ours. The new Team Status feature, included in 4.0, will help you with this without purchasing any other solution. As your team of developers, support, testers etc do their daily work. They just update their status in CE and everyone is updated when viewing the dashboard plugin as well as daily digests that go out.
No need for daily status reports. We will be expanding on this tool a lot as we think it will be a heavily used item in 4.0. For the mean time you can add the departments you want to follow and that is it. The plugin does the rest.
I’ve included an actual images on our inner installation in action.
Dashboard plugin in use at CE
We’ve all been there, emailing to a customer and wishing that we could simply create a pre-created response to save typing the email for the 100th time. With V4.0 – you can! I call this “canned” email for the purpose of this post.
With V4, you have two choices, you can set an auto responder or a client email.
So what is the difference?? The easiest way to describe the difference is that a customer email is where you physically click email to email the client in CE and then select one of the canned emails to send. An autoresponder is where you can set a “canned” response to be automatically sent when a client emails in or submits a ticket that matches certain criteria, for example when a client submits a cancellation request you might want to entice them back with a special discount automatically.
Right – let’s go through setting one up ….. System Setup > Support > Email Routing > Autoresponder Template
Scroll to the bottom and then select the type of responder you want, a selectable email response or an autoresponder (as in above picture).
Then create the reply – for this example I’ll pretend it’s a response to a cancellation.
In reality – this could be anything under the sun, as you can apply routing rules to emails, the possibilities are endless.
I’ve changed the above reply to be “customer email”. Now when I select a client and then select “email client” I can choose the reply I just created.
Of course, I could have simply assigned this to a routing rule for cancellations so that it was all automatic, but then then I wouldn’t have been able to show you it in action!
Here we go with another favourite bit from V4! This time we move on to a new feature – instant messaging within clientexec!
How does it work? It’s based on the usual “whos logged in” area. From there you can see other member’s of your team and initial a chat session.
Each staff member even have their own status – Available / Away /Busy
As you can also see – you can have several chat windows open with different team members! The chat screen itself is very straightforward and easy to use, so now you can have private chat right within your billing and support centre without having to swap between software (aim / msn etc)!
Ok, v4.0 is coming on nicely but I thought that posting some of my favourite parts might be cool. So, where to start? Well, let’s begin with the dashboard – the first thing you see when you login!
CE now sports some great quick access features with an Available Action menu, Action Filter and an intelligent search feature (one search looks up name, organisation, last 4 cc numbers, email, domain, user id, ticket id, and invoice id).
Dynamic search function
Apart from the great new look, the dashboard is now far more customisable than before. You can select plugin information to appear on the dashboard (or not to!) , drag and drop them into different positions, select one, two or three colum layouts and more.
In fact, if you have your own plugins, you can extend the dashboard to show your own information!
Configuring the dashboard view
Drag and drop items around the dashboard
The VPS (or virtual private server) market has gone under some major
changes in the last several months. Many new control panel providers have
entered the market to try and gain some of the share that Hypervm
previously had.
With this in mind, ClientExec have been in talks with several companies to
establish the main contenders, and to work out a development plan to
provide CE users with an automatic way of provisioning VPS.
We are delighted to announce that the first (there is more to come)
completed plugin is FluidVM. FluidVM was chosen as it has several great
features:
- Easy Hypervm migration
- Support for Xen, Openvz and KVM
- iSCSI SAN support
- Countless features for VPS hosts to take advantage of
excellent documentation and lively support and forums
Now ClientExec users can take advantage of this plugin with the following
features:
- Create,Delete,Suspend,Unsuspend within CE itself
- Integrated signup to include choice of OS templates and even the number
of required ip’s
For full instructions on adding FludiVM to your CE install, please see the
FluidVM wiki at http://wiki.fluidvm.com/index.php?title=Client_Exec_Setup
If you have any suggestions or recommendations on other providers, we would
be delighted to receive your feedback
Our successful launch of CE 3.2 brought us much closer to our 4.0 milestone than we first had anticipated. The clean separation of the members center from the admin portal was a huge success. We have done a poor job in advertising all the great features that were included in 3.2 so please take a look. We will do a much better job at keeping you abreast of all important features with our future releases. Review the features of 3.2.
So what’s on tap with version 4.0?
- New Admin Interface. Gone with the old look. Our new interface allows for a cleaner easier to navigate experience. Sneak peak
- Partial Payments. Accept partial payments and track them properly.
- Credits. Want over payments to be applied to the next invoice? Or better yet provide your customers with a positive credit balance to be used in future purchases. It is now possible.
- Staff to staff chat. Quickly chat with staff members that are currently online without having to log into any external IM applications.
- Team Status. Having a hard time keeping up with your staff’s status? Now with the new team status addon it is a snap. Follow the departments you want to be notified of status changes and keep yourself informed like never before.
- Affiliates. Our new affiliates module allows you to offer affiliate status to any customer as well as keep track of orders and commission. No need for 3rd party integration.
- Multi-currency. Major enhancements to our multi currency support have been added to add flexibility in your offerings.
- And so much more. If you want to be involved in the alpha testing please make sure you follow us on twitter and post your desire to do so.
We continue to pride ourselves on great support. I know it isn’t as flashy as new features every other week, but we find it to be even more important for the health and success of your business.
So what do you need to know? Let us go over some details.
- Update and use the alternate e-mail settings. Since we do put a higher priority on direct customer’s tickets, please make sure you add all the e-mail addresses you might use to send support queries. This ensure that your request is correctly tied to your account and not as a guest request.
- All requests are important. Don’t worry if we state your tickets are not highest priority. It is very important to us that your overall experience with ClientExec is exceptional. We understand support goes hand in hand with your experience. So it doesn’t matter whom you obtained your license from we will take your ticket seriously.
- Stay current. Those who did not obtain their license directly from us will only be able to get support, via support tickets, if they are using the latest stable release.
- Are support plans still worth purchasing? Of course. There are some items that direct customers and support plan owners will get in terms of support that will not be available to “guests”. These will be outlined as we move forward but this will mostly be in the lines of upgrades and installation prices.
- Will direct customers experience delays now? We have enough full time support staff to handle the expected load. Those that might feel any delay are those that previously didn’t have access to our support team. Expect the same great responses from our support team. Nivin, Brian, Manu, Tom and Joe are ready to assist you.
- Most Importantly, for the sake of the community please use the forum and KB. There isn’t a reason to submit a support ticket to ask how something works or how to do a specific function. There is a community for that at http://www.clientexec.com/forum, and you will appreciate it when others do the same so you can benefit from the answers.
These changes are made to ensure your ClientExec experience is the best possible one. Without good support, great software is .. well not so great.
