Assigning 'Products and Services Purchased' without invoices or quotes

SuiteCRM Forum - English Language SuiteCRM General Discussion
#1

Afternoon all,

I have a slightly odd use-case and have just started exploring SuiteCRM to see if it is suitable - so far I think it is, except for one aspect. I’d like advice as to whether:

  1. I’m just doing it wrong
  2. SuiteCRM is the wrong tool
  3. I have Greatly Misunderstood
  4. I should go away and read the documentation $here.

We’re an organisation that is contracted to offer a package of support and training to local schools. We’re funded by local government so schools get (most of) the services for free. But we have to make sure that all schools are offered these services and track take-up etc.

No problem, I thought:

  • Create some products/services
  • Simply assign a product as ‘purchased’ when a school takes it up. Hopefully associating a ‘sale’ with a particular teacher (contact) at the school (account)

That’s all gone a bit pear-shaped since it seems that Quotes and Invoices have a required part of the workflow to assign a sale.

Is that correct? Is there a workaround? Or would I be better off not thinking f these separate services as ‘Products’ but doing something else?

Initial thoughts to help me clarify thinking gratefully received.

Using Version 7.11.3

#2

Hi,welcome!

I like your 4 point list, made me laugh :stuck_out_tongue:

There are actually many ways to model your concepts in SuiteCRM, just explore a bit more until you get a feel of how our concepts connect to one another.

I think you should use Accounts for entities (schools) and Contacts for people inside those entities.

A simple flow that might work for you is to make the candidates (people or schools you are about to contact) a “Lead” and convert them to Accounts or Contacts when they decide to adopt your service.

If you don’t need to track Financials or several services made to the same school, I would avoid the complexity of Quotes/Invoices/etc.

Have a look at the articles labeled “Concepts” on my blog, strting with this one: https://pgorod.github.io/Concepts-Accounts-Contacts/

#3

Thanks PGR, that all makes sense and maps well to what I intended.

You hit central problem when you say:

I would avoid the complexity of Quotes/Invoices/etc.

I agree, I would like to - but how to avoid them?

There’s no ‘Create’ button under ‘Products and Services Purchased’ and a bit of Googling suggests that things show up in that list when a quote/invoice has been marked as accepted.

If there is no way to simply say ‘Account X has been supplied with this product’ or ‘Contact Y has been supplied with this product’ its eluding me at the moment.

We will be purchasing a support contract, but I’d hope to fumble through config and set-up of a test system before diving in.

#4

If you have a budget for services I would definitely advise you to involve consultants precisely at this design phase, it will help lay the right foundations for your project. Tell me if you want to be contacted through your Forum’s email for Quote from SalesAgility.

You can change the query of the “products and services purchased” subpanel by customizing here:

https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/blob/master/modules/Accounts/Account.php#L386

You can also have Workflows mark the Quotes as “closed-accepted” automatically so that they fit the conditions to appear there even without changing the query.

#5

Tell me if you want to be contacted through your Forum’s email for Quote from SalesAgility.

Let’s do that.

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