Billing Module for Sugar

**jmcgee** · 2008-12-18, 03:42 AM

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, so my apologies if this should be on another forum. Our company has been working to customize Sugar for our internal needs for approximately the last year. During the course of that, we have added a number of custom modules and functionality. One of the most extensive enhancements has been basically turning Sugar into a "Billing System" of sorts. Currently we use it to bill Internet Service for approximately 10,000 customers.

In short, we configure various "Products" and assign them to Accounts. From there, the system generates invoices based on the established intervals and then charges the customer (now via Authorize.net). We have functionality to support a wide variety of billing related tasks such as entering payments, payment methods, issuing refunds, reporting, declined credit cards, and even provisioning external services based on billing events (i.e. turning service on and off), plus a lot more.

All that is to ask, do others have a use for this type of functionality? I see a few posts here and there about something similar, but I'm not sure what to make of that. Ultimately, we recognize these tasks normally live in other systems, but for us it made sense to bring into Sugar for a lot of reasons.

Anyhow, we are considering making this code available to the community. I think we would have some cleanup, packaging, and documenting to do in order for someone to really implement and use and I want to get some insight as to whether we should pursue that.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

**hubcrm** · 2008-12-18, 08:59 AM

There's probably no question that others out there would find it useful. Even just parts of the approach are likely useful to other developers. I'd certainly be interested to see it in action. I guess you just need to work out at your end whether it is worthwhile for your business to hand it out. It may be that the powers that be would like to monetize the development, they may want help with maintenance or they may be that other rare breed that just gives stuff away.

Normally we want something out of it. If you want to sell it then I'd go and track down some of the others guys that have modules on the exchange. They'll tell you whether or not it's worth the effort. I try and think of this stuff in a number of silos:

Does it make me competitive
Is it my core business
Can it help me reduce costs
Could it hurt my business

I've seen many people in generic development scenarios looking to recover costs from development. I'd say that is the least effective driver to do something like this. The benefits of that project should have already been realised. Well there's a perspective. Hope it helps.

**NicolasV** · 2008-12-18, 11:13 PM

If you make it open source, we'd definitely be interested - you won't make money but you''ll get some publicity.
If you make it commercial, it's harder, because there are some open source billing solutions that can be interfaced with sugar.

**DRTech** · 2008-12-19, 05:30 AM

I've been searching for a payment gateway/billing solution for Authorize.net and SugarCRM but haven't found one so your post definately interests me. Granted there are other payment gateway modules but I'm not interested in switching my gateway to Cyberauthorize.net at the moment.

I would definately want to try this as I'm sure all others who are currently running Authorize.net would. If you released it open souce the framework for auto-billing memberships/contracts could be modified to handle other payment gateways and no doubt expanded on. With some mods, it could certainly take things in an interesting direction as far as future membership site management goes.

I'd be willing to pay for a module that performed as you described provided it was reliable and worked without issue with my installation.

**dantrainor** · 2009-01-07, 06:54 AM

Good morning -

I as well have been looking for a similar solution.

Just wanted to let you know, that I do see a need for something such as this - and to be perfectly honest, I'd rather not reinvent the wheel.

Thanks!
-dant

**mcrocker** · 2009-01-07, 08:17 PM

I would be interested in the billing package if you do make it available. I'm running SugarPro and wouldn't mind paying for the modules if they really worked well