A little bit of urgent advice please!

💬 General Discussion
1

Hi,

I’m really hoping you’ll forgive me in advance for my first post, only we find ourselves in a fairly urgent predicament to have something in place and functioning by the end of this week. Our company are in the process of choosing a CRM to move itself forward and so we’re looking at a number of options. Currently we are testing out a trial of Highrise (http://highrisehq.com) but suiteCRM was also very highly recommended to me to tryout also. I have it all pretty much installed now with test data but I’m a little lost in terms of finding out all the functionality given this is the first time I have used a CRM and the relatively short amount of time I have.

Below are really our current requirements that we know Highrise do offer and I’m just wondering whether suiteCRM can deliver the same functionality. Really just a yes, no or if there are other viable alternative workarounds instead to each point would be really appreciated. If I know this then I’m happy to then go off and do my own research with your suggestions (well as much as possible!) without taking up anymore of anyone’s time!

So, if you’ll permit me…

Regarding contacts we need to be able to set up individual contacts for all areas, i.e. management companies, site names, staff, sub contractors.

These are all in one place and we can then attach these and link them to others as and where needed, as below:

Contacts:-

Management Company
Site Name
Staff Name
Sub Contractor
Supplier

All of the above quite frequently link in with each other.

For example:-
A Management Company has numerous sites with us, the sites then link to staff and sub contractors, so ideally we want to assign or link them with each other.

So we have:
ABC Management Company - With this company we have numerous sites but for now just go with Site Name A, so we would Attach Site Name A contact to ABC

Site Name (A) - then within Site Name A, we have numerous staff who work there so we want to Attach all relevant contacts to that site

Joe Bloggs (Cleaner)
Jenny Bloggs (Window Cleaner)
Flowerpot Man (Gardener)

Staff & Contractors:-

Staff need to be categorised into Job Titles, some staff may have numerous titles i.e., Cleaner, Gardener, Handyman. So against each staff or contractor name we need to be able to enter in a number of fields to make it easy to search for them.

Site Names:-

Site names have numerous services and all delivered at different frequencies.
So we would list a Site Name then within that List Service 1 – Service Frequency and so on.
We need to be able to see by clicking on a site name and all the relevant information to do with that site, this includes what services we provide, what staff work there, contact names of site, access information etc.

Documentation:-

We need to be able to attach documentation, PDF’s etc to each contact whether that be staff, customer, site etc.

Task Management:-

This would be used for relationship management and tracking for example, setting of regular customer contact well being calls, then ensuring there are alerts and tracking system to manage when and if done etc. Could also potentially be used for the management of jobs.

Many thanks for taking the time to read this and I would really appreciate anyone’s valued time helping me out here! Thanks again in advance! :slight_smile:

2

Hi,

This should all be possible. To get it the way you want though would require some customisations through the built in admin panel by using feature such as studio and the module builder :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Many thanks for your reply, much appreciated! I’ve explored a little more into the studio/module builder and although my knowledge at the moment is still way off to actually complete this, I think from watching a few tutorial videos in my head I now have a very vague concept of how this could be achieved.

I do have a few additional questions though if you don’t mind…

  1. Would it be best to edit the existing Contacts module with Studio or build a new module to achieve this?
  2. Would using staff in our above instance be better to be registered on the site as ‘employees’ or as their own ‘staff’ Contact type? There are members of staff that it would be beneficial to be actual users on the CRM in order to share their calendars, view staff documents etc. but am I right in thinking that ‘employee’ site users are quite limited as to how many can be linked to Contacts?
  3. If the above point has them considered as ‘contacts’ themselves, would I be right in thinking that when we want to create a new contact, we could firstly choose the different type of contact (i.e. management company, site name, staff, sub contractor, supplier) from a drop down menu and then depending on that contact type we could have that type’s relevant custom fields appear to add their various attributes? These then could all be linked together as, I presume, ongoing ‘Projects’ or ‘Contracts’ maybe (not sure what else I could classify this as)?
  4. Lastly (and probably most importantly!), I don’t mean for this to equate to a ‘how long is a piece of string’ answer but would what I’m trying to do be considered realistically achievable for someone who has very little experience with CRMs and certainly building modules for them? I always love a challenge but at the moment I’m wondering whether I’m punching above my weight in order to get this set up quickly given the timeframe I have.
  5. Could you possibly recommend any particular how-to guides or resources that you know of that could show me in a bit more detail what I’m trying to achieve please?

Many thanks in advance again for your time.

4

Hi,

A great place to learn about the product and what it has to offer would be on our Wiki and having a look at our Demo Instance

If you would like to store staff records, the best place to do this would be in the employee module. If you would like the employee to have CRM access you can add them through the User Management section in admin. You could add many new field all in studio to allow you you to have the dropdown for their roles. In this you can set mangers of certain departments etc

Everything you have stated would be achievable from within the CRM itself without the need for code customisations, however you could do it in a number of ways depending on how your business works you could rename and use exciting modules or create new modules, it would all depend on how you vision it to work and what you would like to achieve and store on the CRM. I would say yes it is very realistic, if you set out a clear plan for what you would like to do and how you would like it to work it should be fairly straight forward. A great thing to learn after studio and the module builder would be how relationships are built properly as this could save you a lot of time and allow you see more clearly how this would be achievable.

A great article to get you in the mood would be this: Article: 10 Best Practice Tips for CRM Implementation :slight_smile: