The ListManager Billing System allows you to assign lists to customers and bill them for their ListManager usage via email. Even if you do not bill your users, the billing system allows you to monitor usage of your servers, search for lists or administrators, and delete members across all servers.
The instructions for billing assume that you have at least two ListManager servers: the billing server, used to monitor and bill customers, and the hosting server, the server that actually hosts customer lists. You may have multiple hosting servers, as long as they and the billing server have been set up to communicate with one another. It is also possible to have just one server, so that you are running billing on the same server that hosts customer lists.
In order to use ListManager's Billing System, you must first perform the following steps.
1. Set up your server(s) for billing, so that your billing server can communicate with your hosting servers.
2. Add, validate and sync your servers, so the information in your billing server is in sync with that in your hosting servers.
3. Create hosting plans, which determine how much customers are going to be charged for their usage of your servers.
4. Create any additional charges, such as list setup fees.
5. Create customers, with information on how they should be billed.
6. Create billing groups for each customer, that allow you to assign a hosting plan and lists to a customer.
7. Assign hosting plans, charges and lists to your customers.
8. Validate customers, to make sure there are no problems with their records.
Once you've taken these preliminary steps, you may run and send bills:
1. Run the bills, which creates a bill for selected customers (but does not send them).
2. Test and send the bills to customers.