You can find this section in HostBill Admin → Clients → Manage Clients → Clients Groups.

Table of contents

Overview


HostBill comes with a handy feature that allows you to organize your customers into groups. This option allows you to select certain group of clients and change all range of default settings for them i.e invoice due date, add late fee, send payment reminder emails. You can use this feature for example to let your priority clients stand out with privileged discounts, automation settings and more. 
Note: All clients by default are assigned to "None" group

Create new client group

Click on add custom client group button and proceed to client group configuration:

General settings

In general settings tab you need to set basic configuration options for the client group

  • Name - for the client group

  • Group color - group members will be listed using this color

  • Admin-only description - optionally you add the description for this group, visible only in the admin area.

Billing settings

Your client group can have custom-made billing settings. Staff members ca control Continuous invoice creation and Final invoice settings per each client group:

Generate final invoice after payment

You can choose to generate final invoice number once the payment is received or issue final invoice number immediately.

Merge invoices

You can choose to automatically merge invoices generated on the same day (cron run) regardless of due date or automatically merge generated invoices on the same day (cron run) with the same due date. Alternatively you can choose to generate separate invoice for each service

Continue Invoice Creation

You can choose to create invoices even if the previous invoice is unpaid or create new invoices only when previous invoices are paid.

Auto-apply credit

You can decide whether to apply available credit to new orders & recurring invoices immediately or let customer use his credit manually

Credit on Downgrade

You can decide whether or not to credit pro-rated amount on package downgrade

Charge Credit Cards

This section allows you to choose whether you want to let clients pay manually or charge client's credit cards automatically X days before due date. If you choose the latter one you set if you want to attempt only once to charge or try charging credit card for X following days.

Allow client to control invoice delivery method

You can decide whether or not client can choose invoice delivery method

Invoice Delivery Method

You can choose invoice delivery method (Email + PDF, Email + Plain text, Paper, Paper + PDF)

Auto-Collections

You can decide whether or not to move manually issued invoices to Collections status, and if yes, after how many days.

Invoice template

With this feature you can override invoice template and choose a different one for group.

Estimate template

With this feature you can override estimate template and choose a different one for group.

Credit note template

With this feature you can override credit note template and choose a different one for group.

Automation settings

You can decide if you want to keep the general automation settings for this client group or if you want to override the automation tasks that had been set in packages and create custom rules.

The custom rules can concern:

Services:

  • Auto-create
  • Automatic Upgrades
  • Automatic Renew
  • Automatic Suspension
  • Automatic Termination

Domains:

  • Auto-register domains
  • Auto-transfer domains
  • Auto-renew domains

General:

  • Generate invoices
  • Advanced due date settings
  • Send payment reminder emails
  • Add Late Fee
  • Late Fee days

Orders settings

  • Order scenario - you can choose whether customers from this group should fall under your default order scenario or their orders should be processed according to a custom order scenario.

  • Pro-rata billing - with this option enabled clients will have all their services billed on a certain day of the month.

  • Upgrade pro-rata -if you enabled Pro-rata billing for given product/service, you can define how HostBill should calculate charges when clients make upgrades/downgrades. Available options are:

    • Seconds - calculate charge based on time left to due date 

    • Hours - calculate charge based on hours left to due date

    • Days - calculate charge based on days left to due date

  • Contract Generation - you choose to override system or package settings and either generate new contract for each new client or attempt to re-use customer default contarct
  • Default payment gateway - you choose to override system settings and choose default payment gateway per group.

Discounts

Client group feature gives you the opportunity to select group of customers and set them discount for selected product and services. You can use this feature for example to give 30% percent discount for top 10 paying customers.

You can give the client group a Global discount which applies to all of your products and services (in percentage). You can choose if you want the discount to apply to form components as well, and choose exactly which components.

Optionally you can give the client group a discount only to selected products/services from your portfolio. Discount can be either fixed amount or a percentage and can be different for various products.

Support & Notifications settings

This section allows to configure various support & notification settings:

Send emails - decide whether:

  • Use Default settings
  • Send out all emails
  • Don't send any emails

Ticket priority - choose default ticket priority per group

Explicit ticket departments access - choose ticket departments with explicit access to which clients from this group will have access to

Auto CC emails to ticket - you can list email addresses that will be automatically added to new tickets assigned to clients from this group.

Overwrite Support Rates - you can override your existing support rates for this client group or create custom support rates.