Aegir Billing Requirements

Aegir Billing Requirements

Here are the Billing Requirements based on experience from Bryght Light and Hostmaster 1 (the predecessor to Aegir). We welcome requirements from others who will be using Aegir. We will gather requirements and then map to Ubercart and then figure out how's doing what.

The requirements in the following section are not in any order.

Actions required from ubercart savvy people: Are any of the MUST requirements impossible in the ubercart version Aegir will be using? e.g. recurring billing with credit card entered AFTER 30 day free trial?

MUSTS

1. Can bill any type of Drupal Node: e.g. web site, a server, individual sites on a server, support requests
   • Doing this involves putting generic products into the cart that then point to the customer's purchase information (whether it's a server, a site, or whatever). This has been done several times, so not a problem.
2. For a Bryght Light site, there is a 30 day free trial and the credit information is only stored AFTER the 30 day free trial has expired!
   • There is a "Free order" payment method that collects no information during checkout because the order is free. If the products added for a site costs, nothing initially, this would be a way to do it.
3. For a server, billing info is collected and then server (usually a virtual private server aka 'VPS') is created immediately and then user's first payment including an optional one time setup fee is done right after creation (may have optional 30 day trial)
4. Not a billing requirement per se, since this can be done with Views2 - A Comprehensive search facility to find sites, VPSes and Support requests by tech contact, billing contact, site name and any attribute on the CCK type on as well as any attribute of an invoice
5. Not a billing requirement per se, since this can be done with Views2 - Reports (Views + CSV for spreadsheet) are available to show various states (trial or not, what kind of VPS, etc) e.g.
   1. A spreadsheet for each month that shows who paid, for which sites, contact info (email and phone number)
   2. A dynamic spreadsheet that shows which sites are in trial, reseller, contact info, version
   3. A dynamic spreadsheet that shows which sites are live, reseller, contact info, version
   4. A spreadsheet for each reseller of their payments
6. All emails (please pay after trial period, receipts, credit card bounced, credit card expired, etc) are configurable from a web interface not SVN
   • Ubercart has a generic email for order information that is configured through Conditional Actions. Adding more triggers for these events should present no problem.
7. Users can update their billing info and password
   • Ubercart allows admins to change the billing info on orders, but not the customers. I would suggest a page where customers request a change in billing info, since it needs to be validated. Passwords are handled by Drupal.
8. Users can change who gets billed for a site or VPS or support request
9. Users can request receipts but receipts are sent automatically to billing contact as well
10. No Credit Card info is stored in the Drupal system. This data is stored on the payment provider side (e.g. Authorize.net, E-xact, etc.)
11. Users can update support and billing contacts
12. Customers have only one userid and password for all of Aegir Billing (same userid for Bryght VPS and Bryght Light for example)
13. Users can be billed one time only or on a recurring basis (monthly, 6 months or yearly)
14. Can work in any currency (MUST: US dollars, would be nice, Canadian Dollars, Euros, etc)
    • Internally, Ubercart only works with one currency at a time, so sticking with USD is the way to go. However, listing prices in CAD or Euros in service descriptions would be possible.
15. Taxes (e.g. 5 % Goods and Service Tax in Canada for Canadian Customers)

WOULD BE NICE

1. It would be nice to have the concept of a 'reseller' e.g. somebody who re-sells sites and nodes that run on somebody else's Aegir
2. Coupons/ vouchers - perhaps this could be used to implement 30 day free trial

Ubercart Currency added by Macrocosm

In reference to point 14 above...
* I just wanted to add that Ubercart can handle multicurrency quite well. http://drupal.org/project/multicurrency I have also started an up-port of this module to drupal 6.x. Its very useful and has a nice array of options for switching currencies, my setup is based on the country entered in the given users profile. It also uses the currency module to perform the conversions which can be based on market rates or a conversion ratio you choose to set for a given currency. So all you have to do is set your default currency and prices and they will be converted when necessary to a figure based on your conversion settings. Uber Cool!
Update: there is now a 6.x dev release for this module and devin is active thanks to TR ...Yay!