I love WHMCS – My search for a CRM

Recently I went in search of a new CRM for Betacities. As a bootstrapper it’s important that it’s low cost with little to no commitment. As I began looking in to which CRM to use I started to build up a wish list of features:

• Cheap
• No commitments
• Invoicing feature is a must
• Support suite is a must
• Automation is a big must
• Extensible API’s

Looking around the net I bumped in to my old favourites, Salesforce, SugarCRM and Zoho. I have a real fondness for Salesforce.com, they were my first on-line SaaS I ever really used other than webmail and hosting. I’m fond of Sugar too as I used Vtiger as my first CRM in my first ever start-up, Vtiger was basically sugar but open-sourced to full capability. We eventually moved to Dynamics CRM which looking back was a mistake, it’s just too restrictive for a young agile flexible business to use effectively. Zoho looks good and it integrates with Google Apps which is a big plus point. Its intuitive and it offers a free package for up to 3 users.

As I pondered the different CRM’s on the market I began to play around with some trial versions and found them all lacking one important element; billing. Billing is the life blood of a business (next to customers of course), if you can’t bill then you have no cash flow, and if you’ve no cash flow well you have no business. So I started to look at how each CRM handled this task and here are the results:

Salesforce.com – It’s just too expensive for a bootstrapper, I don’t doubt it can handle anything I could chuck at it with ease if I added a few plugins, but the costs are just too high and not justifiable.

SugarCRM – Great CRM, however the community edition lacks functionality that I would really want in the billing department and it has no function for managing customer contracts, not as standard anyway, there are community plugins available but it all seemed a little bit unstable which is I guess is the best way to drive new paying customers. Looking at the costs they wee not too bad but compared to Salesforce.com you feel you’re taking second best sadly. The interface has not changed much since my days playing with  Vtiger and it felt like a bit of a step back.

Zoho – The basic free service lacks functionality for recurring billing and automation but it ticks all the other boxes from a sales tool point of view. Free is obviously not going to be as good as paid but it suits a bootstrappers budget. There is no community edition that I could find but as a web service it’s really nice.

So after reviewing these which one did I pick, well in a way none of them, I went for WHMCS, and I have to say I love it. WHMCS is really a billing engine mainly for web-host’s but it’s so customizable that it ticks every box. The only thing it lacks is a sales tool to manage prospects etc. Here we simply combine WHMCS with Zoho or SugarCRM community edition and we have everything we need.

Installing WHMCS on our servers was very simple after installing ioncube. The documentation available is great and covers pretty much everything you need. We have already began tying WHMCS in to our web apps to manage customer sign-ups, support and payments. All our customer information and automation in one place. We simply separate out our sales and operations which might be the way it should be done. With extensive API’s and database access we can tie the two together to push and pull information as we need to. After playing with WHMCS I cannot ever think of using anything else. From a cost point of vie its around £15 per month or a few hundred to own the server license outright for life with 1 yrs support thrown in. As a bootstrapper it might make sense for the cash strapped to use Zoho free in the short term with a view to migrating to an automated billing engine in the future and splitting the two out. There are CRM plugins for WHMCS too!