Becoming Familiar with Business Manager

Business Manager simplifies the process of signing up, provisioning, and billing new customers according to the following scheme:

In Business Manager, you set up service plans and add-ons corresponding to your service offerings and create online stores where you sell these plans.
A user visiting your site selects one of your hosting plans and subscribes to the services.
Business Manager processes the order. After the payment is received, it sets up a user account and subscription in Plesk Panel, and notifies the new customer by e-mail.
The customer logs in to Panel and starts using the web hosting, e-mail, and other services provided by subscription.
Several days before the end of the billing period, Business Manager sends an invoice to the customer stating the account balance and due payment date. On the due date, Business Manager charges the due amount on the customer's card or bank account, or uses another payment collection scheme that you select.

In addition to automated provisioning and billing, Business Manager offers the following advantages:

Support for integration with payment systems, domain name registrars, and certification authorities issuing SSL certificates.
Customizable online store.
Compliance with requirements for stores operating in the European Union countries.

To learn what operations are available to you when Business Manager is integrated with your Panel, see the table below.

Business Manager Navigation Pane

If your Panel is connected to Business Manager, the Panel's navigation pane contains a set of links leading to Business Manager pages. Each of these links opens the corresponding page of Business Manager in the same window. To switch back to Panel, click the Back to Parallels Panel button at the top of Business Manager's navigation pane.

When you are in Business Manager, you see the navigation pane that contains the same links plus the controls for managing you own hosting accounts in the My Account group. Find more information about these controls in the section Managing Your Account.

Name	Description	Help link
Business Operations menu	Contains links for managing customer accounts and service subscriptions.
Customers	Add, suspend, and remove customer accounts, change customers' billing and contact information. Prepare invoices and collect payments.	Administering Customers
Subscriptions	View and change properties of service subscriptions. Move subscriptions to other service plans by upgrading and downgrading them.	Managing Subscriptions
Invoices	View invoices for customer accounts.	Managing Invoices and Payments
To-do Items	The purpose of the to-do items is to act as an automated reminder tool. Each task that you create will be listed until the action item is completed. For example, a To-Do task can be anything from reminding yourself to run by the accountant's office on Thursday to reminding you to create a website on a control panel because the control panel you are using does not support automation of that action. Tasks can be assigned to any users in the system.
Business Monitoring menu	Contains links for viewing accounting reports and working with invoices and payments.
Accounting	View accounting reports.	Generating Accounting Reports
Payments	Monitor and complete payment operations.	Viewing Transactions List
Events	View and manage system tasks scheduled for execution.	Viewing and Running Scheduled Tasks
Reports	View reports on orders, subscriptions, payments, transactions, and invoices.
E-mails	View a list of automatically sent e-mails and resend them if needed.	Setting Up Automatic E-mails
Business Setup menu	Contains links for setting up Business Manager for serving your customers.
Plans	Set up and manage service plans for provisioning services to your customers.	Plans and Add-ons
Online Stores	Create and manage online stores where customers can subscribe to your plans.	Managing Online Stores
Marketing Tools	Set up discounts, coupons and affiliate programs to promote your plans.	Promoting Your Plans
All Settings	Set up all aspects of Business Manager and prepare it for serving customers.	Starting Business with Business Manager