Transcript

Brandon Carter:

Good afternoon, everybody. Good morning to some of you who are hanging out in the Mountain and West Coast time zones and good evening to those of you that are overseas. Good to see everyone.

Welcome. Welcome in to the latest edition of gPanel Office Hours.

We'll do quick introductions for myself and Mark. We're going to go through a quick run of a couple of new updates that we have to talk about. And then Mark is going to walk you through the billing functions that are available in gPanel, and as always, those of you that are here live, you're welcome to submit questions over on the sidebar.

You'll see a section called comments. You are welcome to drop in your thoughts and questions at any moment whenever they hit you and we will talk about them. Or we'll at least like reserve time at the end of the workshop to go through them. But we like it to be interactive. We love to hear from everyone here.

So yeah, feel free to chime in. There are no bad questions.

And of course, you can always check out anything to do with these Office Hours at promevo.com/officehours.

My name is Brandon. I'm the Marketing Director at Promevo. And I think all of you are familiar with Mark. He is our resident gPanel expert. All things gPanel, but he's also really sharp on all things Workspace. And of course, Google Gemini.

And a lot of you probably have interacted with him frequently over the last few years, as you have had support questions or had new functions and features demoed to you so as always, we appreciate Mark coming on here and helping educate everybody.

Mark Baquirin:

Always a pleasure. Thanks, Brandon.

Brandon Carter:

Absolutely. For those of you that are new, who is Promevo?

Promevo is a Google Cloud sell, service, and build Premier Partner. That basically means we do all the things for your Google Cloud environment.

That's Google Workspace. That is Google Cloud Platform. It includes Gemini now. It's something that a lot of you are adopting and rolling out and that we're helping with.

And of course, ChromeOS, all of your Chrome devices. We service all of that. We will help you. We will provide support for it. And give you one central place to go for all of your Google needs.

So speaking of Gemini, we're going through a series right now of webinars on all things Gemini, all things AI. I really let me preface this. It's not necessarily Gemini. These are just things that businesses need to be thinking about when it comes to AI.

How do I bring it into my organization? What are the risks? What's gonna cost me? Should I look at, besides giving it to my employees like Gemini for Google Workspace, should I also look at integrating AI into my product, into my internal processes. We're covering all of these things.

We've had the first two sessions and those are both on demand. Those are what I just talked about. AI for your employees to enable productivity and to enable them to use generative AI tools and also AI in your product, like looking at Vertex AI and what, but even without a specific AI model, like what should you be looking at? Like, what makes for a good AI implementation?

Two really good conversations that we just had. I highly recommend you check them out.

One week from today, we're going to dive back into that employee world and talk about what does AI look like in the everyday office?

You're spending a bunch of money. These are not necessarily inexpensive tools. So you're going to make this big investment. How do you make sure that people are using it? You think that adoption would just automatically happen because everyone's excited about it. But, it doesn't really work that way.

You have to encourage people to use it. You have to give them examples, but also you want to make sure that they're using it in like ethical ways and that they're using it correctly.

So, all of these things we're going to talk about. What is like day to day life with AI given to your employees and adopted throughout your organization? What does that look like?

And then, of course, we're going to wrap up that series in October with a client roundtable so you can hear from companies just like yours who have gone through every cycle of the AI adoption process.

As always, go to promevo.com/webinars. You can sign up for the entire series, as well as gPanel webinars.

Which, speaking of... so, we've talked for a couple of months about what the next evolution of gPanel Office Hours is going to be here's what we're going to do. We are going to transition these into shorter more basics focused webinars, where we're going to walk you through the most important thing.

It's a little bit geared toward our newer users and people who just need a reset on maybe how they use gPanel. Those are going to happen every month. The first one will be on October 8th. It's meant to be a little bit more bite sized, half hour at most.

Now, some of you, I know, especially those of you that are here, you're like "I'm a power user. "Like, I've been using gPanel for a while. I like these webinars to explain things." These aren't going to stop. The regularity of them may be changed up a little bit.

So we're still going to have whenever gPanel rolls out whenever the team rolls out a new update or a significant new feature, we'll still have a full webinar, a full hour long webinar, to dive into it.

Just like we've done for the past 12 months. Today we'll cover billing, but we've covered signatures and reporting. So all of those are still available. But as we roll out those new functions, you'll get a full webinar and the ability to ask whatever questions you want on those.

The commitment that we're going to make is Mark and his team will be going back through all of these gPanel articles that we have on the knowledge base and making sure that we have up to date videos, making sure that we have up to date instructions and screenshots.

So don't worry, we're not giving up on, educating and talking about gPanel. We're just going to take a little bit of a different tact where there's a ton of new people coming into gPanel. So we want to make sure that everyone's using it correctly.

So those will be our kind of our monthly webinars, but you'll still get all of the videos, all of the webinars, and all of the interaction that you want whenever we're, whenever we roll out something new.

And as always: promevo.com/webinars to sign up for these webinars and more. We have a bunch of them coming up that are not just gPanel as well, as you can tell.

All right. So what is gPanel? We know that there's a lot of people who aren't gPanel users who are watching this either live or in the future.

gPanel is basically your omniscient tool over all of the things that happen within your Google Workspace environment. That's user management, that's reporting, it's automation, onboarding, and offboarding. Mark, if you'll pop over to the next one, just to give you an idea of all the things that can be done.

Basically, if it happens within your Workspace, gPanel gives you visibility and control over pretty much all of it. We're constantly rolling out new features. We just had a big one a couple of months ago with Rules Engine, which we'll talk about briefly here in a second.

We're shipping out a new user interface. So the tool is growing and getting more useful.

Let's get into what's new. There's not a ton. Like we just met, like I mentioned, Rules Engine is live. For those of you on the Enterprise tier you should see it in there.

I highly recommend going back to our webinar where Mark did a pretty in depth walkthrough of it. That's online, on demand, free to view. Go check it out.

Specifically though, we continue to roll out the next generation of gPanel interface upgrades. Signatures is now live. Literally got that note just before we started this webinar. Um, reporting is also live, but I think there's one particular improvement that we've made to that. Mark, if you can talk about for just a second.

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, absolutely. In the reporting module one huge improvement is now because the reports have grown so large, we have close to, or around 70 reports. Now we've categorized them so that they're a lot easier to find. They're easier to understand which reports go together, which reports are related and that should help you when deciding which reports that you want to run.

Brandon Carter:

Love it. That's 70 plus reports. So, yes super helpful now to be able to view those Within categories as opposed to scrolling through a long list.

So, those of you who are subscribed to our release notes mailing list would have known that a couple of weeks ago when we first announced it.

So go to promevo.com/releasenotes. You can sign up to get updates as they happen. We publish stuff pretty regularly on there and you will be the first to know. You don't have to wait for a webinar to hear about it.

So with that everyone's tired of hearing me talk. Mark, I'm going to go ahead and set you off. Basically in gPanel, you have the ability to control a lot of the billing aspects of your Google Workspace and your Google Cloud system.

Mark's going to walk you through all of that. So take it away, Mark.

Mark Baquirin:

Thanks, Brandon.

Okay, so today we're going to be talking about Google Workspace billing and what it is and how you can use gPanel to help you organize your Google Workspace billing.

So first of all, it's important to understand which billing plan you're on.

If you are first coming to Promevo, we can set you up on the sort of plan that would make most sense to you. And I'll be explaining them here. And if you're already on a plan, if you'd like to use gPanel to perhaps add licenses to your plan, you'll first have to know which plan you have and to see if you're able to do that.

So there are three types of plans. There's the flexible billing plan, the annual plan and annual billing. And then there's an annual plan with monthly billing.

So the flexible billing plan, your Google Workspace subscription, you are billed monthly per user account. And you can add and remove accounts at any time. When you add and remove accounts, it'll automatically add and remove the Google Workspace license that you have for that user for that account. And you only pay for the accounts you use during that month.

The other two plans are annual plan with annual billing and annual plan with monthly billing. They're similar, but here's the big difference.

With the annual plan and annual billing, when you first set up the plan or at renewal, you pay for the licenses that you expect to have, and you can create users within that license threshold. Say if you started off with 100 licenses, you pay for all 100 at the beginning of your plan, and then you. You can create up to 100 user accounts.

If you happen to need to create an additional user account before your renewal it's okay to add licenses. You will need to have an additional license in order to add a user, so you'll have to pay for the additional license before you add the user.

It's similar with the annual plan with monthly billing. The difference is you're billed monthly rather than annually. If you decide to add a user beyond the initial agreed upon licenses you would add the license first. Then you can add the user and then you're not billed immediately. You're billed at the end of the month or on your next billing cycle, I should say.

All right. How do you add Google Workspace licenses using gPanel? And why would you do this?

If you don't have gPanel, if you are on one of the annual plans, typically if you wanted to add an additional license and thereby adding an additional user you would first need to contact your reseller and place an order for the additional licenses you need.

This is usually not a problem. It happens very quickly. However, there are times when your reseller may not be available. It could be off hours, on the weekend, on a holiday, and so forth. But if you have gPanel and you have an annual plan, you are able to add those licenses yourself, if need be. And not need to rely on your reseller at all.

First of all, I want to point out that this is not available for flex plans. And of course, the reason is if you're on a flexible plan you When you add and remove users, it automatically appends and removes the licenses. If you have a flex plan, this doesn't pertain to you. It's only those with annual plans.

So how do you do it? You would be navigating to the plans and billing section and don't worry after this overview, we're going to be going into a live demo. So I'll show you where everything is, but this is just this is just a overview of the steps here.

So you'd be navigating to your plan. Go to gPanel, navigate to the plans and billing section and from there select your Workspace subscription. Now you could have a Business subscription, Enterprise subscription Gemini subscription, a number of different subscriptions that you will see on your gPanel plans and billing section.

So select the subscription in which you want to add licenses. Depending on how you're set up, that should take you to the way that you're going to pay for the license. In this case, we have a credit card set up. It could also be an invoice and it could also be a bank account. And we'll go over those steps in just a minute.

After that's done, you need to review your order, make sure everything's correct. You'll have a chance to see that your user count is correct and that all the charges is correct. Oh, and by the way, your charge is actually the pro rated fee based on your renewal date.

After you confirm that, we want to talk about how can you add Chrome licenses to gPanel?

What we just talked about was adding Google Workspace subscription licenses, like Enterprise subscription, Business subscription, and so forth. But if you have Chrome devices, you can actually add Chrome licenses also in gPanel.

But first of all, I just want to point out that you cannot add Chrome licenses if your Chrome licenses are through another partner or vendor. Instead, you would first have to transfer your licenses to Promevo before you're able to purchase new licenses in gPanel.\

So how do you actually do this? As before, it's as simple as navigating to the plans and billing section choosing this time the Chrome Enterprise subscription, hit add licenses, and it will give you the details here.

You'll have a chance to choose how many licenses you want. And in this page we have what the next page will be. In this page, we have an option. You can choose purchase order, which is the default option when choosing Chrome licenses, or in this case, we've already added the credit card or debit card.

So we can choose either of those.

And if you don't have, if you don't already have a credit card or a bank account added to your payment method you can select the actions and then go to payment methods. Clicking on payment methods will bring you to this next page. Here, it should say purchase order when you are looking at a Chrome subscription or Chrome licenses.

It says invoices here because this is if you are going to be updating your Google Workspace subscription, so invoice or purchase order. That's the default. But if you wanted to add your own payment method, which would be a bank account, you would click on add payment method just to the right.

If you choose add bank account, you will get this form where you can fill out your information, account type, routing and account number, and that should be located on your one of your checks there, and then address and so forth.

You can go ahead and save that. And then your your Bank account would be added. So once you've selected your payment method, if you are on a monthly payment cycle, you may want to set up auto pay just makes it a little bit easier, and then you don't forget to make that payment.

This is how you set up auto pay. In that same dropdown menu, you choose access billing account click on manage payment methods. And then check the box for auto pay. And that's it. From there on out, you will be just charged automatically.

All right, next, I want to talk about some settings that you can set up in your plans and billing section.

These are specifically the subscription settings in gPanel. So this is for getting notifications and making sure that your admin team and your billing team are all up to date with the information in gPanel.

All right. So in that same actions, dropdown menu you'd select manage settings. And if you don't already have any contacts on that page you'll see when we go to the demo, we have several contacts, but if you didn't you would simply have to add a contact.

So you can see here that I've added we've added a contact here. You can always edit the details. This is a Promevo contact. However, you can choose off domain contacts as well. Just whatever you'd like to put in there.

And then there's a little check box. If you want to make that the primary contact, if you have a list of several contacts, you can choose who will be the primary contact, and they will get all of the the notifications.

All right. And the next thing to set up is your license count notifications. So why you would set this up is when your license count drops below a certain threshold, you would want those contacts to be notified, so that you are not in a situation where you need to create a user and you don't have the available licenses.

And once again, this is for if you have an annual account only. This wouldn't matter if you, or it wouldn't matter so much if you have a flexible account.

But on that same page we were at, and I'll I'll demonstrate that in just a minute. If you scroll to the very bottom, you'll see a notification section.

And in this section, you can set up whether your license account notifications are active or you can disable it. If If you're getting too many notifications, there's also a box to ignore the threshold. We have that unchecked because down below we've set the threshold at three and then the number of days between notifications at two.

So that means basically after three, three or once you get down to three licenses you will be getting, or your primary contact, your primary billing contact will be getting notifications sent out to them every two days, just notifying them that, Hey, you've hit that threshold. You might want to consider purchasing more licenses.

So that's up to you to set that up and to, to set up your threshold and your tolerances.

Alright, so next up I'm going to be showing you where in gPanel all of this is located. So one moment while I switch things over.

Here we are back in gPanel. We're going to start off in the main screen, which is the user management screen. But for our demo today, we are going to be heading down to the plans and billing section on the lower left.

When you click on the plans and billing section, the first screen, your subscriptions page, you will be seeing all of the subscriptions, your Google Workspace subscriptions, your gPanel subscriptions, the license count and so forth. You'll be seeing everything that you're subscribed to.

So you'll see if you have Google Voice, if you have Chrome licenses for devices, and if you have Gemini licenses and so forth. You'll see all of those here. This particular demo account only has a Google Workspace Business Standard, subscription, a Google Vault subscription, and of course gPanel.

And you can see here the license counts. So here we have 16 and 16 Google Workspace Business Standard licenses and 13 are being used right now. So if I basically have three licenses that I can assign.

If I perhaps want to create four users rather than just three, I know that I'll need to buy one additional license before the fourth user can be created.

So I would have to come in here, click on my Google Workspace Business Standard license. When you click on it, it expands.

I can click on add licenses here, and I'm brought to this page where I can then choose I can use these arrows or I can simply type in, I can choose how many additional licenses I'd want to purchase. And if I want to purchase one additional license, it will give me the breakdown. Here I'll just choose two so you can see.

There's a breakdown in cost, and it's all pro rated based on the end date of my renewal, so my renewal contract terms. So you'll get a breakdown of all the prices before you make any purchases. So let's say I'm adding three, just go ahead and hit continue for my payment method because this is a demo account, I only have the default method, which is invoice.

I'm not going to continue here because I don't really want to purchase because I don't have an additional method here. Let me show you where to go. If you haven't yet set up your payment method this is where you would go. Let me back out of here and back on the main page.

To the right of your subscription is a, an actions drop down menu. Click on there and you have the ability to manage a payment methods right here. And here's where you'd be setting up your payment method.

So you can see that invoice is my default. I can add my bank account and hitting that. All I'd have to do is fill this out. Um, account type routing number, account number that you can find on your check and then save that. And then I will have an alternate way of billing. It'll bill directly to my bank account.

The auto pay would be set up in the same actions menu. If you back out to the beginning and click on that actions menu.

Once I've set up my bank account there, I can click on auto pay. And then that's it. That's all you have to do for auto pay.

If I wanted to go into the settings in which I can set up my contact list and I can set up my licensing notifications from this menu. I can just hit manage settings But if I was in the subscription section, I would hover over my subscription go to the actions drop down and hit manage settings here.

All right. Your payment account is up here, your payment profiles down here. So you can of course edit your account type. You may want to put this in here, business, nonprofit, reseller et cetera. You can also update your business name and address.

And there's a little bit of a delay, but just give it a second. Here we go. And that is normal.

Payment contacts right down here. If I do have a long list of contacts, but if I wanted to add a new contact, I can go ahead and hit that. Put in my email address. I'll just use mark@promevo.com, continue, and then I would be prompted to fill out all the rest of my information here.

But let me cancel that because I've already done that. I'm at the very bottom of our long list of contacts. So I've created myself down here. If I was to expand that, I can make myself the primary contact if I wanted to receive all the notifications. I don't for now. I'm going to cancel that.

The notifications is right underneath that. So here are the notifications. It's looks like it's already been set up, but if it's not set up, you'd have to just simply expand that. Your notification count is here. You can activate it or disable it. If you're getting too many notifications, like I said, you could always do that. Or you could always just keep it active and then change the, um, perhaps the number of days between notifications or the license threshold.

What this is saying is if I get down to 10 licenses every single day these these people will be notified if they were checked. So nobody's checked here, but if they were, they would be notified. So that's how you would set everything up there.

All right. So there really isn't too much to it.

Billing is just one of those necessary parts that you have to set up at some point. If you have any questions setting up your billing, if you're running into any issues please feel free to contact us and we can help walk you through, but those are just a few billing tips for today.

Brandon Carter:

Thank you, Mark. It's super helpful. Really interesting.

Again, as a reminder to everyone that's watching, if you have questions, go ahead and submit them in the comment section.

We do have a couple of questions that were submitted ahead of time and some of them are probably things that you just covered, but I think they're worth reiterating.

The first is, excuse me, Mark, can you set up different payment types per subscription? In other words One credit card for subscription A and a different credit card for a subscription B or a bank account.

Mark Baquirin:

Yes, you can. And I, let me reshare.

Back on your main subscription page, you'll be able to do that if you had several subscriptions here. The Vault subscription is related to that one. But if I had perhaps a Gemini subscription, I can go through the same method of setting up my billing just for that, um, I'm sorry, my payment method just for that account.

So it just depends on whichever one you choose. Just highlight the one you want to choose, hit actions, manage payment methods And then you can add your payment method or keep it on invoicing. You'll get the default invoice

Brandon Carter:

And keep this up because the another question I had is around the notifications. What can you, on those notifications is, are people notified when a payment goes through or are they notified when details of the billing change? Or both?

Mark Baquirin:

Oh, for notifications, I believe whenever there's some sort of action on the account, when a payment's made any updates I believe, yeah, any updates made to the account, people will be notified. As well as just the threshold notifications that you set up as well.

Any sort of billing updates that you should be aware about anytime something's been purchased, or maybe a payment doesn't go through, anything like that that's when the notification will be sent out.

Brandon Carter:

Excellent. Thank you.

And of course, gPanel billing happens within the same window, correct? Like within the same section?

Mark Baquirin:

You mean the same time interval?

Brandon Carter:

Just underneath plans and billing, you're not just managing your Google Workspace subscriptions. You're also able to manage your gPanel, like the tool, the platform itself.

You're able to manage that from within the same section, right?

Mark Baquirin:

You do have access to see your gPanel subscription by itself because it's a separate subscription. But in general your gPanel subscription will match one per one with your Google Workspace subscription and now it's...

Now, all that back and forth. I think i've clogged it.

Brandon Carter:

Of course. Live demos.

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah. So you can see that my gPanel user licenses are exactly the same as my standard business user licenses. So you would typically have no reason to update this by itself. It's there so that you have visibility, but there are certain organizations that actually have multiple types of Google Workspace.

Subscriptions, they might have a split business and enterprise for some reason. It's rare, but we've seen that before, and in that case that would make more sense. You'd want to keep an eye on that you have a 1 to 1 ratio if it's split between the two. So yeah, but typically you don't really need to adjust the gPanel subscription by itself.

Brandon Carter:

Gotcha.

Okay. Final question. Quiet crowd today. Didn't have any submitted questions from the audience, but as always, you can reach out directly to us and we will make sure that you get answers to anything you're thinking about or anything that you want to know.

You touched on it at the very beginning. What, And I know that this is something that, that changes that will be changing over time, but what can and can you not manage or with from within gPanel as far as your various subscriptions across the Google Cloud world?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, the ones that I've seen here, I'm not, I don't believe every subscription will be listed in gPanel automatically.

For instance, Google voice it used to not be Updatable within gPanel, you, we couldn't even see it, but recently it has been added. So if you have a Google voice subscription, you should be seeing it here in gPanel.

And with Chrome as I pointed out earlier with Chrome subscriptions, if you have a Chrome device licenses. Those won't always be here specifically when you first when you first start your billing off you may have to talk to the Chrome team, and they'll work their magic on their back end to include it in the billing. And also, it might be a situation where your Chrome licenses are from another reseller, and if that's the case, they'd have to be transferred to us first.

Gemini licenses, you'll be able to see here and... oh, that's it for now. That's it. That's all I can remember at the moment.

Brandon Carter:

I think the call to action there is, if you're watching this and you have subscriptions that you think should be showing up in your gPanel, but they're not they reach out cause it may be, or there may be just another small step that you need to take like moving your chrome licenses over from one reseller to Promevo.

Yeah, that's true of pretty much anything. I wish gPanel would do blank or can gPanel do this? The question the answer to that is always to reach out to us and we will see like it may be possible, or it may be something that we need to build in either case. We'd love to hear from you all.

With that, Thank you, Mark. I'm going to move back to PowerPoint land and we're going to wrap it up. As always reach out to us anytime you can send an email to updates@promevo.com. That'll come directly to my inbox, and we'll see it. And I'll address it.

Be sure you sign up for the gPanel release notes and the newsletter. You can see the URLs for those here, promevo.com/gpanel-newsletter. And of course, our Office Hours will keep you updated on all of the new webinars as they come through.

And finally, like I mentioned, we do way more than gPanel here. A week from today, we're going to be talking about AI adoption throughout the organization.

October 1st, if you've ever wondered about backing up and archiving aspects of your Google Workspace for the purpose of just security or disaster recovery, we're going to be going through that with our partners CloudM on October 1st. So be sure you sign up for that.

And of course, October 8th, we're gonna have our first gPanel Basics walk through where we will take anyone that wants to know how to do the standard essential processes within gPanel. We'll walk you through those. And of course, we'll have time for questions and answers there as well.

So with that thank you, Mark. Much appreciated.

And thank you to everyone who is here and everyone that's viewing it in the future. So glad to have you along for the ride.

Happy Tuesday and we'll see you soon.