Ideas wanted for data organization

đź’¬ General Discussion
1

We’re trying to implement SuiteCRM at our firm. We make sails & canvas for boats (both power and sail). A few facts

About 85% of our customers are individual boat owners

About 10% are Boat Dealers/Brokers with the rest being various corporate customers.

We were toying with putting our customers as accounts regardless of if they were a person or a corporation, putting contacts on the corporate customers and then we run into a problem.

We kind of need each boat to be it’s own entity because we keep track of it separately (we have several customers that we’ve worked on that boat for 40 years but it’s on it’s 4th or 5th owner).

We’re also going to use projects to track new products on boats and cases to track repair orders and tying them all not only to their boat but their appropriate account as well.

Any ideas on how to track boats? Do we make them contacts and have them move between accounts when they sell? Is their anyway to track the history of a link (see who the old owner was…).

Thanks in advance for any help or ideas!!!

2

Any module related to Accounts can do the job of representing the “boat” concept, I guess. It’s your choice to either start from a pre-existing module or just make a new custom one.

Have a look at the Products and Quotes modules. You might want to use products for your own items, which will be associated with the Account, and then just have another Product which represents the Boat and is worth 0$ (in your view, because you didn’t sell it to him). You can link the boat to multiple clients as it gets sold. I’m not sure how to keep the historic record, though, maybe just a sequence of notes attached to the product?