[there]

but with lots of clients and websites it becomes a faff to track the payments

how can it be difficult to track payments? either an invoice is paid or it isn't.

for the billing system i wrote and have used for years (http://corduroysite.com/), the home screen lists outstanding bills, outstanding invoices, and open projects. if an invoice is past due, it stands out in red, and (optionally) customers are emailed every n days past its due date.

but to answer your questions,

1. i use corduroy, add recurring services to each customer account, it generates invoices for all recurring services billed on a given date (monthly, yearly, etc.) and emails the customer an invoice. if they have a credit card on file, the card is charged, the invoice is paid, and the customer is emailed a paid invoice receipt instead.

2. corduroy, yes.

3. yes.

4. monthly for pretty much all services (email hosting, web hosting, pbx hosting, server support contracts, etc.). domain registrations are added as yearly services, so when recurring billing runs that one month, it will add the yearly registration and monthly hosting on the same invoice.

5. yes, but it wasn't available at the time i wrote my system so i made my own.

[ollierattue]

but with lots of clients and websites it becomes a faff to track the payments

-> how can it be difficult to track payments? either an invoice is paid or it isn't.

50 clients all making payments on a monthly basis. Reviewing your bank account for payments, marking invoices as paid (harder to differentiate if they are all the same amount). That's a faff. Setting up recurring billing via PayPal with auto-invoice marking as paid removes this.

It looks like Corduroy allows clients to pay for their invoices via credit card online. Is this correct? Can they setup a recurring payment via credit card?

Thanks,

[there]

yes, corduroy supports recurring billing with credit cards, but currently only with braintree (cards are not stored in corduroy's database for PCI compliance, so it requires a braintree account with a vault).

customers can login and see their invoices and do one-time payments as well as manage their stored cards.

[ollierattue]

So I signup, add my bank account details, and then my clients can pay me via their credit cards, which they can put on record and do a recurring payment?

[there]

you would need to signup for a merchant account with braintree first and tie that to your bank account, and then you would enter your braintree account info into corduroy.

when your customers (or your staff) would enter a credit card and choose to save it, it gets stored in your braintree vault and future payments tell braintree to use that stored card to process the payment.