Introducing Admin AI: An AI Assistant for Your Hosting Billing Panel

FluxBilling now has Admin AI: a chat assistant inside the admin panel. Ask it a question in plain language and it looks the answer up across your clients, invoices, products, hardware, settings and the FluxBilling documentation. Ask it for a change, such as a new add-on, a corrected proforma or a plugin install, and it prepares that change as a card you approve. It can also move your data in from another billing platform or from spreadsheets. Admin AI is on every plan and runs on your own Claude or ChatGPT API key.

Why an assistant in the admin panel

Most questions an operator asks during the day are simple, but the answers sit on different pages. How many proformas are still unpaid this month? Which servers in stock would this new plan match? Which e-mail provider is this panel set up with? Answering each one means opening a list, filtering it, opening a record and adding things up.

Admin AI does that reading for you. It also knows which page you have open, so “why is this invoice still open?” means the invoice in front of you, and it replies in the language your admin panel is set to.

One rule shaped the whole design: it never changes anything without asking first.

What you can ask it

A few of the starting suggestions in the panel:

• “Unpaid invoices this month”
• “Draft a new add-on”
• “Recommend a payment plugin”
• “How do I set up taxes?”
• “Suggest CPU equivalences from inventory”
• “Migrate from another panel”

Behind those it can read:

• Clients and services: search clients, open an account with its balance, open documents and services, or search services across every customer.
• Invoices and proformas: filter by status, client or date, open one with its lines and payments, or total them by status in your base currency.
• Products and add-ons: categories, products with their prices and billing cycles, add-ons and the products they are attached to.
• Hardware: the CPUs, RAM and disks in your DCIM inventory, the hardware equivalences already set, and which servers a product would match.
• Settings: what a setting is set to and where it lives. Secrets are never shown, not even masked: Admin AI only says whether one is set.
• Plugins: marketplace listings, versions and prices, and what is installed on your panel.
• Documentation: the FluxBilling docs and the reference guides for plugins and the API, with a link to the page it used.

Every lookup runs under your own permissions. A team member without billing access is not offered the billing tools at all, so the assistant never tells anyone more than their own panel would.

Changes arrive as cards you approve

When the answer is a change, Admin AI fills in the form for you and shows it as a card. It can prepare:

• new or updated categories, products and add-ons, and add-ons attached to products
• CPU, RAM and disk equivalences from your inventory, or switching one on or off
• corrections to the lines, due date or notes of an unpaid invoice or proforma, or cancelling one
• everyday settings, such as company details, tax, ticket or appearance options
• for super admins: installing a free marketplace plugin, updating one, or switching a plugin on or off

A card lists every field it changes, from what to what. Here is what happens when you approve one:

1. A confirmation tells you how many requests it will send with your account. Hard-to-undo changes, such as cancelling a document or installing a plugin, are marked in red.
2. The server checks that the record still looks the way it did when the card was prepared. If an invoice was paid or edited in the meantime, the card is refused and you ask again.
3. Your browser runs the change through the same admin API as the panel’s own Save buttons, with your session. Every validation, permission check, document and e-mail behaves exactly as if you had made the change by hand. If a step fails, it stops there and shows what went through.
4. The applied or failed change is written to the audit log under your name.

A card nobody approves expires after 30 minutes. Starting a new chat removes unapproved cards without changing anything.

AI Migration: move in from any platform or spreadsheet

FluxBilling already has dedicated importers for WHMCS, Blesta and EasyDCIM. AI Migration covers everything else: HostBill, ClientExec, a home-grown system, or the spreadsheets you have kept your customers in.

It works with any source whose data you can reach as a MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL database, directly or through an SSH tunnel, or export as CSV or JSON. You can upload up to ten files of up to 45 MB each, and an Excel workbook is saved as CSV first.

1. Connect the source. Database passwords and SSH keys are stored encrypted and never sent to the AI. Database connections are read-only, so nothing in your old system can be changed.
2. Admin AI reads the structure. It looks at the tables, the columns and a few sample rows, with passwords, card numbers and other secrets masked before the model sees them.
3. You approve the mapping. Which tables become product categories, products, clients, services, invoices with their lines, and payments, and which column fills which field, arrives as a card. A read-only preview then shows the record counts, warnings and anything that would block the import.
4. You approve the import. One job runs in the background and reports its progress on the card. Running it again skips everything already imported.

The import sends no e-mails, provisions no servers and charges no cards. Documents in a closed accounting month are skipped. Imported clients start inactive and switch on once they own an active service, and your invoice numbering continues after the highest imported number. AI Migration is for super admins only.

What Admin AI will not do

• Change anything without your approval. The assistant itself cannot write anything; applying a change is something your browser does with your account after you say yes.
• Show a secret. A credential pasted into the chat is removed before the message reaches the AI provider.
• Touch money: no refunds, payments, mark-paid, account credit or credit notes from the chat.
• Edit a paid invoice, a document in a closed month, a document number or a status.
• Change sign-in, security, backup, mail or host settings, or anything that would send data or mail somewhere else.
• Talk to your customers. Admin AI is for your staff in the admin panel, not a customer-facing chatbot.

These limits live in the platform rather than in the prompt. Which tools the model is offered, what they return and what they are allowed to prepare is decided before the model sees anything.

How it fits with the AI support assistant

The AI support assistant works inside tickets: it drafts replies from the customer’s account, invoices and past tickets, and prepares upgrades and refunds for staff to approve. Admin AI covers the rest of the admin panel. Both use the same API key, and neither sends anything to a customer on its own.

Models, cost and setup

Admin AI runs on Claude from Anthropic or ChatGPT from OpenAI, using the key you set in Settings › AI. It calls tools while it answers, so it needs one of those two built-in connections; a provider connected as an AI-provider plugin can still draft tickets and blog posts, but cannot run Admin AI.

FluxBilling does not charge for it, and it is included on every plan. Your AI provider bills the usage to your key.

To switch it on, enable Admin AI under Settings › General › Feature Toggles (the AI toggle has to be on as well), then give the departments that should use it the “Use Admin AI” permission. Super admins always have it. The assistant opens from the header as a floating window you can drag, resize and minimise, and as a full-screen sheet on a phone. The conversation is kept in your browser tab for your account only.

Getting started

The Admin AI page covers the details, including the full list of what it reads and prepares. Plans start at €4.95 per month; see pricing for what each plan includes.