Accounts confusion and migration help

💬 General Discussion
1

Do we really need to use accounts? In the examples I keep finding it seems to be mainly for companies but we only deal with people not business to business.

In the CRM we are moving away from we have a ‘leads’ table and a ‘clients’ table. The lead is called by telesales staff and an appointment is generated, if at the appointment the product is sold then it converts to the clients table which is where we record installation date, date of contract signing, and keep track of deposits and amount quoted/outstanding etc.

My problem is we don’t really use accounts or opportunities as such. I need to find a way to transfer all out existing clients to SuiteCRM. I see there is an option to set require accounts false which I have done but I’m wondering if we should be using it to make full use of SuiteCRM’s capabilities. If we should use it then I don’t know what we would call the account name as if we have multiple clients with the same name then the account names will be the same. I see there is an auto-increment module I can install as recommended elsewhere, would this be the best option?

My plan was to use the contracts module as our clients table as it has some of the options by default that we would need like contract date signed etc. but now I’m not sure that’s going to be the best way.

I was thinking maybe I could export the clients table and use the same client ID for the account ID, the contact ID, contact ID and oppertunity ID and then import the corresponding data to each module.

We also have a notes table that i would like to import but it seems a note cannot be attached to a contract but it can be attached to an account, contact, or opportunity.

These issues make me think I shouldn’t use the contracts module for this.

We are using Filemaker as the CRM and we are using a cloud based automated dialler system for the telesales staff. When a sale is made it gets inputted to the Filemaker CRM.

Our current process is:

Leads are imported to the cloud dialler.
Telesales staff generate interest and get a sales rep appointment time and date.
If sales rep sells product at appointment then a record is created in the ‘clients’ table
If sales rep doesn’t sell then it goes to a sweeper table who tries to sell it one last time.

We don’t have any accounts, contacts, contracts or opportunities tables.

Can anyone help me with with the process I should follow please?

2

You might want to check out this post

https://pgorod.github.io/Concepts-Accounts-Contacts/

and the other posts on my blog tagged “concepts”.

There are many ways to achieve a good system with your requirements. I would keep your main personal entity in Contacts, that way you get the most options and relationships by default. I would only use Leads if you need a previous stage, a “pre-contact”.

There is no problem with skipping Accounts and Opportunities. Accounts are quite useful to group people (even if that group isn’t necessarily a Company they all work for).

When importing from a previous CRM and you need to join different kinds of related records, it’s really useful to use a simple PHP import script. It’s not strictly necessary, but it sure simplifies things, if you have that skill in-house.

Sample import code here:

https://suitecrm.com/community/forum/developer-help/9395-how-to-add-a-contact-to-a-target-list-through-code