We've mentioned our new billing and account management system casually over the last few months, but today, we're giving our first "official" preview of what's about to be launched. There is a lot of stuff involved in the coming release but in this post, we're going to focus on the biggest new feature — automated client billing. This functionality will be available exclusively on LightCMS.

A preview of the website detail page in the new billing system (using sample data).
What is Automated Client Billing?
LightCMS has always given you the ability to manage all your client websites within a single account, but this new release makes huge improvements in the way you manage them. To this point, all websites under your account have been billed to a single credit card. The idea has been that we charge you our discounted rate and you bill your clients whatever you wish through your own billing system.
Automated client billing now offers you another option. You can choose to bill an individual website to a client's credit card directly. You set the price that the client pays and we pay you commission on the difference between our discounted price and the price you set.
If you bill my clients directly, won't they find out about LightCMS or Element Fusion?
No. We'll be running all CMS charges through a generic entity and that entity's name will show up on your clients' statements. You'll just want to tell them to expect charges from this new entity for their website service. We've even set up a website on the new entity's domain to help explain the charges in a non-branded way in case they have questions. Oh, and the entity's website's domain utilizes private registration as well.
How much commission can I earn?
With automated client billing, you decide how much commission you'll earn. That's because you set the pricing for the websites under your account. Our base pricing always stays the same, so the higher you set your pricing, the higher your commissions will be. If you utilize our suggested retail pricing, you'll earn around 35% commission on every website, every month. Of course, you can set your commissions higher or lower if you wish.
How do I receive my commissions?
Once you have websites paying through client billing, your profits will accumulate in what we like to call "your money pile." You'll see your money pile on most of the pages in your account management console. Whenever you're ready to withdraw them, you can simply click on "withdraw funds" and we'll send them to you by PayPal. PayPal is the only option (for now), so you'll need an account to withdraw your funds.
Do I have to use client billing?
No. When we roll out the new features, all of your websites will continue to bill to your account. You will have to manually change them to client billing if you choose to do so. You can move any number of your sites to client billing and the rest of your sites will remain billed to your account. You can also change a website back and forth between client billing and account billing whenever you wish.
Can my clients upgrade / downgrade their own websites?
Yes, if you choose to let them. You'll have to login to the account section and set up the names and prices for your website plans. Once you do that, clients who are being billed individually will be able to login and upgrade / downgrade their website. The pricing and plan names they see will be what you set for them to see. Also, clients who have free websites under your account will be able to upgrade themselves to one of your paid plans if they wish (you can turn off this functionality if you want). We'll cover more on how this works as we get closer to launch. Plus, it's all explained very clearly inside the new interface.
What else is new?
There's an improved user interface across the entire account management section; a simplified, filterable listing of all websites under your account; a full detail page for each of your websites; the ability to delete or disable any website under your account; detailed listings of billing activity for your account and for each client-billed website; and much more. We'll be sharing more about all of these features in the days ahead.
Enough already! When's it going live?
We know that many of your have been looking forward to this for a while, as have we! We are very, very close, but we want to be cautious about putting hard dates out there in case something unexpected happens that pushes things back. That said, we are unofficially and tentatively planning to launch everything on Thursday, June 11th, 2009. Again, that date might change so please don't make any plans around it. We're simply providing it to keep you in the loop on our plans.