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Account Lab Plus Starter’s Guide
This guide will give you a simple idea on what each of the sections in the ALP admin do.
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The dashboard is the first section you see when you first login to your admin area. The dashboard lets you quickly see how many pending invoices you have as well as some graphs showing you different information on your ALP installation. If you have any missing elements for your installation (e.g if you didnt have MHASH support enabled) then these would show up under 'Critical System Alerts'
The graphs allow you to view sales, orders, invoices and the current server load, this gives you a quick and easy guide on how well each section is performing.
You will also see here the status of your servers and any customers being online in the last hours.
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From this section you can view all your customers as well as add new customers. From the 'View Customers' section you are presented with a list of your customers as well as the option to 'Edit', 'Delete' or 'Add New Order'. The 'Add New Order' lets you add a new order for any customer. You can also search your customers for any information you need.
The 'Add Customer' section, as the name suggests lets you add a new customer to your database. You will need to specify a valid email address as well as a password. You will need to fill in all the form entries which have a red star (*) by them. The 'Discount' field lets you specify a discount for this individual customer as well as if they can have use coupons as well. The 'Credit' field lets you add credit or debit to the customer. You can then specify a reason for this choice. A 'Trusted' customer will make the customer exempt from manual validation by admin (when manual validation is configured).
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This section allows you to check everything related to orders, including viewing orders, adding orders and checking any orphan orders. The 'View Orders' page does exactly what it suggests and lets you view your orders, you can then edit, delete or add an invoice to the order. You can also search your orders.
The 'Add New Order' lets you add a new order and assign payment methods to it. You can add a domain to the product as well as set the status for the order. All of the other options on this page are pretty self explanatory.
'Orphan Orders' lets you review and add orders that haven't been recorded properly because the buyer didn't return from the payment gateway. You are given the choice to either 'Validate Order' or 'Delete'.
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This section allows you to view invoices and to view the manual payments due. The view orders page gives you some invoice statistics at the top of the page related to pending, paid, refunded, cancelled and deleted. Also from this page you can edit any individual invoice.
The 'Manual Payments Due' gives you another report on what manual payments are due, as before you can 'Edit' or 'Delete' any of the payments due. Manual payments are, for example, any offline payment methods or any payment methods which need to be manually validated.
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From this section you can add categories (e.g Shared, Dedicated, Free Hosting), add products, add order addons as well as activate subdomains. The default categories page gives you a list of the categories already created. You can edit, delete or add new categories by just following the relevant links.
The 'Products' page, again lets you edit, delete and add new products to your installation. In the 'Add Product' page you can assign a server (if you are using multiple servers) to install the accounts onto. You can also define the 'Account Creation Method' which specifies when the account, if at all, gets created. You can assign order addons to the product as define the billing cycle for the orders.
The 'Subdomains' section lets your customers signup with a subdomain instead of using their own domain. First you need to set a base domain for your subdomains which all subdomains will be created from. You can specify more than one and give your customers a choice.
As same as all the others 'Order Addons' lets you first view all the order addons as well as add new ones. Order addons could be SSL certificates or backup space.
On the Products overview page you can also setup if you want to offer domain registration only.
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This section lets you view and add 'Specials', 'Coupons', 'Credits' and 'Dicsounts'. Specials are special offers which you can offer your customer if they order a specific item. You can set a start and finish date as well as what the customer receives if they order your special offer.
On the next area you can manage all your coupons which you have added. Coupons could be 10% off or free setup depending on your advertisment. This area also lets you 'Send Coupon Code' which sends a specified coupon to specified customers which they can then use on further items.
The 'Credits' and 'Discounts' area just lists your customers which have credits or discounts set, you can set the discounts and credits from the individual customer page.
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The 'Tickets' section offers you a basic ticket system for admins which dont already have a ticket system or cant afford a more complex ticket system. For admins which dont want to use our ticket system you can disable it.
Following the relevant links you can add departments (e.g Sales, Support) and manage the tickets. The adding of staff to these departments comes later in the 'Settings' section. Using the 'Manage Tickets' section you can view any ticket (by number) and view all the open or closed tickets. This basic ticketing system gives you a starting point.
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Now comes the major parts of your ALP admin panel, the 'Settings' section control all aspects of your installation.
The 'Configuration' section allows you to set different configuration options for each section of your installation.
In the 'Order' area you can set the titles of the order page as well as if you want customers to be able to search for domains. You can also control the sending of welcome and invoice emails, otherwise these would need to be done manually. The 'General' area lets you set the general options for your ALP installation including your Terms Of Service URL and your Copyright note.
The 'Billing' area lets you choose which number your invoices and orders start from as well as what you want at the beginning and ending of the order and invoice. You can also choose to send the invoices out a set amount of days before they are due, giving your customers more time to pay them.
From the 'Currencies' section you can change your default currency as well as add additional currencies to cater for international customers. You can also choose to automatically retrieve currency rates from Google. The multiple currencies you create will only show when you have any offline payments, such as cheque or bank transfer selected. This is so that the customer can pay for your products in their own currency. The 'IP Location' section lets you use a IP-Location database to automatically retrieve the location of a users IP address. This can be very useful in fraud preventation as you can match up the IP Location with the location they have given on the signup form. If they dont match you know they are of a higher risk (either using a stolen credit card or using a proxy). Depending on which database you use you may need to download a CSV file from a given URL and upload it to your website.
The 'Staff' section, as mentioned before, lets you add staff members to your installation and assign permissions for each staff member. You can also set the theme for the user and assign a support ticket department for them.
The 'Server' section lets you set a default server for account creation as well as add and delete servers. This is very helpful in a multi-server system where you have multiple servers. In the 'Add New Server' area you need to assign a name and IP address as well as set the nameservers for this server. You can then set the control panel of the server and you will need to set the 'Server User' and 'Server Hash'. On Cpanel the 'Server User' is your username whilst the 'Server Hash' is the hash key which is set in Cpanel under Setup Remote Access Key. You can also set if the server needs SSL and whether or not to automatically create accounts. Finally at the bottom you can set monitoring systems on the server to show if each server is online.
The 'Payment Method' section lets you set up the different payment methods you intend to offer to your customer. Each payment method has its own set of configuration options which are related to the payment method itself.
Similarly for the 'Registrars' section each different Registrar that ALP supports has its own area where the configuration takes place.
The 'TLD' section lets you add the specific TLD's which you offer (such as .com/.net/.org). You can then set whether you want them to automatically register with a Registrar or for you to do them manually. ALP supports many different TLD's and you can also add your own TLD's if you know the WHOIS search server.
The 'Tax' section lets you add your own Tax to all your purchases (if in your country/state tax is required).
'Welcome Email Templates' lets you change the default emails sent out to your customer. If you click on the 'Instructions' tab you can see the codes required and a default template for each email. 'Announcements' can be set which will show up on your customers index page of ALP. You can add them by following the Add link.
Just like the Announcements page the 'FAQ' settings let you add Frequently Add Questions for your customers to view. This may save on the amount of support tickets that you receive.
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The 'Import Packages' feature lets you import packages from your servers without you having to manually create the products. You can also reset the database using the 'Reset Database' feature which will reset your database back to the default. Use this only in extreme circumstances.
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The 'Forum' link redirects you to the ALP support forum at http://www.netenberg.com/forum. From there you can ask questions and gain support from other users and staff.
The 'Logout' link does exactly what it suggests, it logs you out!
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You should now have enough information to control ALP just the way you want to. If you find any problems with anything related to ALP feel free to post in the support forums or open a support ticket.
Originally found at http://www.netenberg.com/alpguide.html