Hi, I am testing SuiteCRM for implementation in our company and a first issue/question popped up.
In our current CRM system, when an opportunity is lost, the user gets a pop up in which he needs to fill in some fields (reason of lost, competitor who won the deal, …).
In SuiteCRM, I don’t see any functionality like that.
I was hoping on some logic like “dependent fields”, but this doesn’t seem to exist in SuiteCRM neither.
Therefore, 2 questions:
How do you handle normally such “dependent but mandatory information”, like reason of lost opportunity?
Are “dependent fields” planned in a next release of SuiteCRM? Or any plugin that enables such functionality? Would solve a lot of my current open questions!
You have something called “Calculated fields” which you update from within a Workflow.
To do it without Workflows, you can use a simple code customization in a logic hook.
But let me understand your requirement better: what do you mean by “an opportunity is lost”? What is the system event for that? The opportunity is saved by the user with a status of “lost”, is that it?
The user heard from the prospect that the deal is lost.
The user updates the status of the opportunity to “Closed - Lost”
At that moment, two fields “appear” or they become mandatory: “Reason lost =” and “Competitor =”
The user must select in both fields the correct value.
This allows us to analyze for example the number of deals lost against competitor x or for reason y and adapt our sales strategy accordingly.
These fields only make sense when the opportunity reached the stage “Closed - lost”, so it would make no sense to make them mandatory earlier.
If they are always there, there is a risk that the user “forgets” to update them when they should get a value…
I’m afraid that kind of customization is not very straight-froward to achieve in SuiteCRM, unless you are a PHP developer.
You need to override the view class to inject some Javascript, and then that Javascript can handle user events and make layout changes according to the Opportunity Status, for example.
You can do this easily without any coding using a add-on called “Dynamic Panels”, which is available in the store. https://store.suitecrm.com/addons/dynamic-panels
Besides panels it also enables dynamic fields based on value(s) of other fields in a module and can set fields to be mandatory.
I would recomment you try the add-on for 30-days and test if it works for you.
If you need some assistance, let me know.