Is there interest in a ProcessWire based client/hosting management software?

[bernhard]

This is a request for honest feedback.

--- first, some background ---

It's the first of October and I'm doing my bookkeeping. This has been a pain for me for a long time, but nowadays I'm - believe it or not - really enjoying it.

That's because I've developed a system over time that makes it fast and efficient for me to charge all my customers that have a maintenance contract. It's basically just a few clicks and some days later I have the money on my bank account. I try to provide as much value as I can for that money, which involves managing their web hosting (on a dedicated VPS), doing backups, monitoring their services for uptime, etc.

I'm not getting rich from that money nor is it enough to live from (at least not in Austria 😄 ), but it is money that I get where computers do the work for me even when I'm having some time off, which I think is great.

I try to make it visible for my clients that I provide a lot of value every month by a monthly performance report which looks like this:

This is very basic at the moment, but I think it looks quite nice and it does its job.

I also have another system that creates invoices for the work that I do (eg monthly contract, custom web development, bug fixing, new features, etc) and another system where I manage my time tracking.

--- now here is my question ---

All of that is based on ProcessWire and quite outdated. I want to rebuild this at some point, but I'm only having a handful of clients, so it's kind of overkill to develop something like this for just a few clients/euros. But I think it's very nice and I enjoy developing these things, so I'd really want to do it.

Now I was wondering... Could other ProcessWire users also need this? I guess there are many self employed users in the community and maybe some are struggling with the same challenges or are working on the same goals?

Or are you in a similar situation and have solved it differently. Maybe with some software that already works great for you. I know there is a lot of commercial and even open source software out there, but I love ProcessWire for its flexibility and customisation opportunities and perfectly tailored workflows - for me - make the difference between something being tedious or fun. 🚀

What do you think? If there is no interest I'm likely going to build it for my own 😄 If there is interest we can think of how to make it work and be beneficial for everybody.

Now back to my bookkeeping ... 😅

[monollonom]

I love it that you called it “RockCare”, to rockfinity and beyond... 🙃

In all seriousness, IMHO I don’t think this is something worth developing for others to buy (nor as a free module). Everyone has their own set of requirements (and their own way of doing) and this would make it a very hard time on you to figure out a “one-size-fits-all” solution. I would advise to save yourself this burden, knowing you’re already going on big endeavours with other modules (e.g. RockCommerce).

However this is just me and you could definitely beta-test it with select users to see if they could adapt to your way of doing and in this case foresee a potential public release.

In my particular case though, this is something I wanted to tackle for a while now, also with ProcessWire. But I know for sure that I would want to do it all by myself, as a way to experiment (and have fun like you said) but also to make sure it’s perfectly tailored for my usage.

What would be nice though is having a thread (this one?) so people can share what they put in place (PW-based that is) to help them managing this aspect of their work. Not going as far as sharing a whole site-invoice profile, but something along the lines of the associated blog post 🙂

[bernhard]

2 hours ago, monollonom said:

What would be nice though is having a thread (this one?) so people can share what they put in place (PW-based that is) to help them managing this aspect of their work. Not going as far as sharing a whole site-invoice profile, but something along the lines of the associated blog post 🙂

That's a great idea, but I think it would be better placed in a dedicated thread 🙂

2 hours ago, monollonom said:

I love it that you called it “RockCare”, to rockfinity and beyond... 🙃

Haha, well... it had to have some name 😄 

2 hours ago, monollonom said:

In all seriousness, IMHO I don’t think this is something worth developing for others to buy (nor as a free module). Everyone has their own set of requirements (and their own way of doing) and this would make it a very hard time on you to figure out a “one-size-fits-all” solution. I would advise to save yourself this burden, knowing you’re already going on big endeavours with other modules (e.g. RockCommerce).

Yeah that would be the concerns that I had... Let's wait a little for more feedback 🙂 

2 hours ago, monollonom said:

In my particular case though, this is something I wanted to tackle for a while now, also with ProcessWire. But I know for sure that I would want to do it all by myself, as a way to experiment (and have fun like you said) but also to make sure it’s perfectly tailored for my usage.

Totally understandable. I've also thought about creating something like this totally open source, but this is not possible for several reasons. One is that I'd have to reinvent several of my modules (RockPdf, RockGrid) and another one is that it has to generate income. I know some don't like this, but nobody can live from love and likes.

Thx for your input!