Business workflow automation is one of the advantages of using WordPress as your back office platform. Accepting and managing payments is an area where you can save time, speed up projects and increase collections and thus revenue.
Project Panorama has several ways of accomplishing this that you might not know about! Using Panorama and some of our most popular add-ons you can sell or accept payment for projects then automatically generate a project and user account for your new customer or clients.
Let’s look at the possible options:
WooCommerce
We recently released a WooCommerce add-on. Using the Woo-Commerce add-on you can setup a project template, create a product within WooCommerce and then have it listed on your site for sale.
Once a user purchases that product Panorama will duplicate the project, create a user account for the user (if one doesn’t currently exist) and assign them to the project. The user can then log in and immediately see the scope of the project and even begin working through it themselves if it’s a self-managed project.
This approach is best for well-defined project packages with fixed prices. If you’re selling a project as a product, this works great!
Gravity Forms
If you need more flexibility in your sales then using our Gravity Forms add-on might be a better option. Using gravity forms you can have a single form that can sell multiple different projects.
Using the Gravity Forms conditional capabilities, you can charge different prices or clone a different Panorama template based on the answers a user fills out. By integrating with one of Gravity Forms payment gateway add-ons you can accept payments in a variety of different ways including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc…
At our sister company (a design agency) we accept a deposit through a project approval gravity form. Based on the details of the form it will generate a custom price and generate a new project according to the type of project they’ve approved.
You can also use Gravity Forms to accept additional payments throughout the project! Simply create a separate “milestone” payment form and direct or link your customers to the form at the appropriate time. Using the milestone and phase shortcodes you can have the payment link appear automatically when you hit a billing milestone.
Sprout Invoices
If you’re selling custom solutions you might be looking for an invoicing solution rather than a purchasing solution. Panorama integrates with the best WordPress Invoicing solution available — Sprout Invoices. Using Sprout Invoices you can issue and collect payments on invoices, estimates right within your client’s Panorama dashboard and individual projects.
Easy Digital Downloads
If you’re an Easy Digital Downloads user then consider our EDD add-on. Similar to the WooCommerce add-on this allows you to associate Panorama and an EDD project, automatically generating a new project upon purchase and check-out.
Any Membership Plugin
If you’re using a membership plugin you can use our “New User Projects” add-on to sell access to projects through a membership fee! New User Projects allows you to automatically generate a new project and assign it to a user when they register. This can be managed on a user role level, so simply create a new user role for each type of membership you’re selling and then select which project you’d like cloned at the time of creation.
Conclusion
There are lots of ways that Panorama can speed up your workflow and help you generate more revenue. Allowing users to pay for projects is a great way to cut down on project setup and on-boarding time, increase collections and generate more revenue!