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New Vision offers a wide range of account management tools,
including:
Account Search
New Vision suggests various approaches to searching accounts:
Basic Search
To track down accounts, select Accounts in the Search
menu. The following form will appear:
Here you can customize your account search by setting criteria
in the following fields:
- Payment Method: define the type of payment to search
accounts which are paid for by the type of payment designated.
- Plan: define the plan under which the accounts
you are searching were created.
- User name: restrict your account search by defining
particular user's login.
- Account ID: restrict your account search by defining
particular user's system ID.
- E-mail: retrieve all accounts created by a user
who provided the billing e-mail address you designate.
- Registration Date: retrieve all the accounts created
during the time period designated.
Note! The dates must be written with slashes: MM/DD/YYYY.
Other approaches
to searching accounts
- track down accounts by Domain Names. Choose Accounts
in the Search menu [available search criteria:
by a combination of characters in the domain name].
Typing music in the Domain Name field,
you retrieve all accounts with domain names containing 'music'.
For example:
music.funhosting,
musicians.funhosting,
instruments.music.funhosting,
instruments.musical.funhosting,
music.insturments.funhosting,
musical.instruments.funhosting.
- track down accounts by user's Contact Info. Choose
by Contact Info in the Search menu [available
search criteria:
by First Name, Last Name, Company, City, State, Postal Code and Country]
- track down suspended accounts. Choose Suspended
in the Search menu [available search criteria:
by Payment Method, Plan, User name, E-mail, Registration
Date and Suspending Date]
- track down deleted accounts. Choose Deleted in
the Search menu [available search criteria:
by Payment Method, Plan, E-mail, Registration Date and
Liquidation Date]
- track down accounts by Billing Balance. Choose Billing
Balance in the Reports menu [available
search criteria: by Plan, Payment Type, Balance Set Value
and Registration Date].
- track down accounts by Billing Entries. Choose Billing
Entries in the Reports menu [available
search criteria: by Account Id, Username, Type of Plan,
Type of Entry and Registration Date]
For more information on reports and statistics see the Signup,
Transactions and Revenue Reports chapter of this manual.
*Designating search criteria you are always suggested to
set the number of retrieved accounts listed at a time on a
search result page.
Tracking down Transfer
Traffic (version 2.07 and higher)
This feature allows you to monitor the overall traffic by
user accounts run up over the specified period of time (go
to Search -> Transfer Traffic).
Traffic readinngs retrieved by this tool don't coincide with
the Summary Traffic shown up in the user control panel
(Quick Access, INFO menu) as the later indicates the traffic
run up during the current billing period which is different
for each user while 'traffic report' shows it for the period
defined.
Click the Edit icon to get access to the controls over
the user account.
Sending Traffic
Limit and Disk Quota Warnings (version 2.09 and higher)
You can set New Vision to automatically send warning messages
to the user's contact email (Settings -> User Warnings)
as the user approaches the traffic limit or disk quota. This
way, you provide users with an opportunity to avoid or at
least foresee any Extra payments:
New Vision will suspend only accounts with excessive traffic,
not the overdue or unpaid ones. The latter can be suspended
and deleted only manually.
Search Results
Whatever approach used, account search result pages are organized
almost the same, slightly differing from the one below:
where:
- Username: user's login. Click it to view this user's
contact info.
- A. Id: account's system Id number. Click it to
view this account's properties.
- Created: the date and the time when this account
was created.
- Plan: the type of plan this account was created
under.
- E-mail: the billing e-mail address provided by
this account's user.
- Payment Type: it can be none, if billing for the
account is disabled.
- Balance: this account's balance.
- Credit Enlargement: the amount this account's credit
limit was enhanced by.
The two last columns deserve closer attention.
Crediting and Debiting
Accounts
Click the Debit or Credit icon to single-shot
credit or single-shot debit the selected account:
- Amount: set the amount you credit or debit to this
account.
- Description: state the reason for debiting or crediting
the account. This is what the user will view as the title
of his bills' description.
- ID String: enter how you will identify the transaction.
This is what the user will view as a specified reason for
crediting or debiting in his bills' description.
- Comment: give your special comment to this transaction.
You are crediting an account when your receive a check payment
from the client or when you want to refund an amount or give
it as a present.
You are debiting an account when you want to charge users
for some specific service you performed.
For example, the balance of ($9.95) means that the client
owes you $9.95. Positive balance means that the client has
extra money on the account to spend toward hosting/services.
Click the Enlarge Credit icon to change the
credit limit for this account without changing it for the
whole plan. In the box that appears, enter the amount by
which you would like to enlarge the credit limit:
NOTE: Entering a negative amount (e.g. -2.0) will
decrease the Credit Limit.
For example, the Credit Limit for the plan is $10. To make
it $12 for a specific account, enter 2. To make it $8 for
a specific account, enter -2. This will not affect other accounts:
their credit limit will remain $10.
Controls
As the icon names in this section suggest, you can:
- Login into each account
as the user to view or edit settings, to fix problems, etc.
- Delete any account. When a
user whose account has been removed tries to log in, the
"No such user [user login]'"
message appears.
Warning: If account is removed, you can't restore
it! It is highly recommended to avoid deleting accounts
unless they have been suspended and all debts and payments
have been settled. Suspending accounts first place prevents
you from unexpected consequences. Before deleting an account,
make sure that neither you nor the user have any financial
obligations to each other!
* When deleting reseller's account, make sure all reseller
end-users' accounts have been removed beforehand.
- Suspend any account. All
the settings and configurations could be activated if needed
on the contrary to deleting the account. In case of suspending
account, the owner of the account will be notified of the
suspense reason, and will also be able to view his invoice
for each billing profile. Starting from version 2.08 Internet
visitors to suspended sites are redirected to the predefined
page index.html in the /hsphere/shared/skel/suspended/
directory. You can edit this page and always keep a backup
of it, as it will be overwritten at the next system update.
- Resume a suspended account.
Mind, if you resume a trial account, it will be suspended
again in some 24 hours. To bring this account into operation,
the trial user should create a valid billing profile.
Sending MassMail
On each search result page under the chart you can find navigation
links and the Mass Mail link:
Mass Mail allows you to send same message to the owners
of all accounts you have selected with the Search tool. The
message is sent to the e-mail addresses that appear in the
list of retrieved accounts.
From: enter one of your e-mail addresses to send the
message from.
Autoinserts (version 2.09 and higher):
- Template messages: Welcome message, User Login
and Password, User Balance
New Vision enables you to send not only custom, but also template
messages. Note that message templates will be sent only
if the "Use message templates" box is checked.
In this case, any info you enter in the message body will
be ignored and the template ONLY info will be sent.
As an alternative to the templates, you can send custom
messages. Enter the message body into the "Message"
field. In this case, you can use the Autoinsert options.
Specify where you want to insert the info by checking "Subject"
or "Message" box and choose one or more of the
following autoinsert options from the drop-down boxes:
- Company: name, address, city, state, country, zip
code, phone, fax, email, website.
- User: first name, last name, company, address1,
address2, city, state, country, zip code, phone, email;
One Message Per Email Address:
- Yes - only one message will be sent to an address,
regardless of how many accounts use it.
- No - the message is sent to every account's e-mail
address even if it is the same for different accounts.
In version 2.08 and higher you can choose whether to send
to users' Contact Info e-mail or Billing Info email by setting
the Email type for Mass Mail option in the account
search criteria.
Changing
Billing Period Starting Date (version 2.08 and higher)
New Vision allows you to change the billing date for a particular
account. Go to Billing -> Search Accounts ->
click the account you would like to administer -> Reset.
Next, enter the new starting date for the payment interval
and press Submit.
Be very cautious when using this feature. Changing the billing
period starting date may result in major problems:
- If you shift the period starting date backwards, the
client will be charged the recurrent fees twice for the
overlapping days (for the remainder of the old period AND
for the new interval). For instance, the initial payment
interval date was November 11. If you set the date to November
2, the system shall charge the recurrent fees till the end
of the old period (i.e. November 11) and once again for
the new period (which starts now on November 2). Thus, the
9 days will be charged double recurrent fees. Most likely,
you will want to credit the extra
charged amount back to user's account.
- If you shift the starting date forward, you will close
the current billing period. The next payment interval, however,
will start only on the date that you set. This way, you
will create a gap between the billing periods. The system
does not charge the customer for the time gap period. The
customers are only charged the recurrent fee for the resources
like traffic or MySQL Quota that they actually use up. Also,
if a user purchases some resources during the gap period,
the system will charges the recurrent fee for these resources.
However, it will calculate the price from the moment of
purchase till the end of the new billing period. Say, you
close the current billing period on November 11 and set
the new starting date to December 1 (with a one-month payment
interval). This way the user does not pay any recurrent
fees the remaining days of November. Still, in case a user
buys a resource on November 20, he/she will be charged the
recurrent fee for the interval of 40 days (November 20 -
January 1).
- If you set the same billing date for many customers, the
system may become overloaded on this billing day.
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