Looking for Ticketing, Invoice, Payment Gateway

[RaTix]

Anyone know of any good Open Source and free programs to handle Ticketing (help desk), invoicing and billing?

I've already looked into,
VTiger
Spiceworks
OSTicket
SugarCRM

They all miss on one aspect or another though. They are either great ticketing and inventory systems like Spiceworks (although riddled with ads) and lack the billing/invoice, or have everything for billing/invoice and lack in the ticket department.
Ticket aspect I'm really looking for is email integration. To automatically parse emails into support tickets. And Asset management to attach tickets to assets. Then be able to add tickets to invoices for billing. A Customer Portal with payment gateway to Authorize.net as well.
I figured I'd ask before I mod the hell out of one of the progs listed above, or just code my own from scratch.

[Cottoinc]

dude spiceworks all the way it is great I use it at my work

for billing you can add your hourly rate to the tickets cant that act like an invoice

[RaTix]

Yeah, but I'm not sure how well it will handle multiple clients. I'm sure it's great for a single internal IT dept, but what if you have multiple clients, with multiple networks, all different inventory. I'm just worried it's all gonna get clumped together which will be a headache. Plus I want some sort of customer portal where they can submit/view their tickets, projects, invoices, etc..

[Cottoinc]

With spiceworks there is a user portal. I try to get my staff you submit tickets that way. It is fully customize able. We just you email for login but you can have email and password and it is AD intergratable.

As for inventories you can group assets and chose when to scan them. If you dont have access to the network or it is a laptop they have a remote agent that will send the info to SW. As long as you keep the assets in the groups you should be fine I have 5 buildings that I track.

[RaTix]

It's still missing a billing/invoice component or a payment gateway. And seeing as it's not just a PHP/MySQL app, I can't even mod one in myself. As I said they all are really good in one aspect or another, but always missing one of the key components I need.

[Cottoinc]

It looks like people are making custom billing reports

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/159471-spiceworks-billing-report-help

[RaTix]

I just spent the morning messing around with Spiceworks. It's not going to work out for what I want. The Remote site setup is a bitch, and trying to get a remote AD to communicate with the central server is not happening. Especially when these remote sites are on different WAN with no outside way to connect to network. I don''t want to have to setup VPNs or anythign just to get the info.
Plus all the inventory gets lumped into one huge mess. Sure you can separate Workstations servers etc.. but not by sites or clients, then into those categories. Or if there is a way it's not that clear.
The billing and invoicing is still an issue and there is no clear way to do it. Plus I really clients to be able to login to the portal and view invoices, see what tickets they are attached to, and pay for them right there.

I think I might just go with vTiger since it has the most of all the features I need, plus I can easily mod it myself if needed. The only thing lacking is the asset/inventory scanning. I might just use Spiceworks locally at clients to collect the network info, then import into vtiger. Or maybe I'll just script my own nmap setup for vtiger to use.

[Cottoinc]

Thats cool I will check vtiger out also.

[Reaper316]

I use pen and paper :D

[norm]

We use ServiceNow here at work. I don't think it's what you're looking for though..lol


Did you check out M$ to see if they have a solution for you? My wife's company just signed up to use their CSR ticketing software. They are some interesting solutions from buying the whole package to cloud based services at $50 per month.


The other thing is with the free options you talked about, will any of them import into an accounting software like QuickBooks or OpenERP?


That might be the easier way of handling things. It also might have plugins available from ticketing software to a billing software. If you have a stand along accounting package it might make things easier if you need to involve an accountant in the future or the IRS comes knocking.



Link for accounting software

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software[/ame]

[RaTix]

Thanks, but yeah I should have stressed the FREE factor more. I can't pay for any of that type of shit, lol. I don't plan to migrate things later if I don't have too. So I'm looking to get up and running cheaply.

I know about MS Dynamics, and even vTiger has a more fleshed out on demand version. But I don't like cloud solutions when it comes to my record keeping. God forbid you have a bad month or clients are late paying. You can't afford the monthly cost and then poof, everything is gone and you are stuck in a cache 22. Need to bill and work to pay the bills, but you need to pay the bills to bill clients and work.

Pretty much settle on vTiger for now.

[norm]

I saw Free, read Free, and ignored it..lol

I was just thinking a simple ticketing system, open source or not, coupled with an accounting software, again open source or not, might be the better way to go instead of an all in one type of thing.


I'm giving you credit and saying it'll succeed and trying to future proof you.

With the various open source options for both types of software you would have to think somewhere someone has all ready done the work for you of getting them to work together.