Charleston Telecom customers log into their regular ConnectBooster portal to see all of their bills, pick which invoices they want to pay, and make a single payment. The Datagate/ConnectBooster integration means that when a customer clicks on a Datagate bill inside ConnectBooster they see the professional, easy-to-understand PDF bill produced by Datagate.
“The unified portal is simple and convenient for customers,” says Bob Bascom, Founder, Charleston Telecom Solutions.
“It’s a seamless experience – customers don’t even know that Datagate and ConnectBooster are different platforms.”
Datagate’s integrations with QuickBooks Online and ConnectBooster let Charleston Telecom see all invoices in both QuickBooks Online and ConnectBooster, with accurate accounting on what is paid and taxes owed.
Charleston Telecom uses Datagate to bill the hosted VoIP services that make up the majority of its business. To bill one-off projects such as cabling, surveillance cameras and labor, it uses ConnectWise. Most customers have a credit card on file, or have enabled ACH payments for hosted services, but in the past Charleston Telecom couldn’t use the card or ACH to take payments for one-off jobs. Lack of integration meant the invoices weren’t in both systems – but now they are.
“The Datagate/ConnectBooster integration gives our customers a smoother service experience,” Bob Bascom says.
Charleston Telecom emails VoIP invoices from inside Datagate to the customer. It sends payment reminder emails from ConnectBooster that let the customer click to see invoices and make payments.
Datagate’s integrated billing software streamlines Charleston Telecom’s processes
Charleston Telecom had billing challenges with its old provider due to lack of integration. When a new customer called, the company would put the details into ConnectWise and dispatch off that. Then it would have to re-key all the information into the old billing platform. Now it simply changes the classification of the customer in ConnectWise to ‘Datagate customer’ and the information flows automatically into Datagate.
The old billing platform did not integrate with QuickBooks Online, so Charleston Telecom could not use QuickBooks to see who owed money. It had to do a manual deposit to get a payment into QuickBooks. When a customer paid by check, Charleston Telecom had to do a double manual entry into both the billing platform and QuickBooks Online. A distraction could mean a payment was received in one system but not the other. This caused some embarrassing moments with customers, says Bob Bascom.
“We cashed a customer’s check and then sent overdue payment reminders. The customer payments portal on our old billing platform also sometimes crashed in the middle of payment. A customer tried twice then gave up, and was debited twice with no acknowledgement by the billing platform. That was highly embarrassing.
“With Datagate, the data is accurate and the checks and balances are strong. Before, when money entered our bank account you couldn’t see if there was a mistake without doing a lot of tracing work. With ConnectWise and Datagate, each deposit has a transaction number and it’s easy to trace and audit payments. It’s so much easier to receive payments and match them with QuickBooks Online. And I can see real-time accounts receivable.”
Charleston Telecom is a SkySwitch reseller. Bob Bascom met Datagate at a SkySwitch Vectors conference just before SkySwitch became a Datagate reseller.
“SkySwitch is a great company with excellent product and support, I have nothing but good things to say. It was really easy to integrate Datagate to ConnectWise, QuickBooks Online, ConnectBooster and our other systems. Datagate’s back-end saves us a ton of time. We have built an automated machine that runs itself. We are not reliant on any individual. Very importantly, our customers can trust the accuracy of this system. I would recommend Datagate.”
