Hello,
we are running non for profit organization.
All we have is a team of staff (Consolers) = who provides services and advises to our clients.
Clients = could be one person [single] or a family [husand, wife and kids]
Record management:
what we are looking for is to manage our clients and relative, sometimes we provide consulting in employment, settlement, advises … etc. the client will have a full service with us, and we need to record all services received in the proper way, for future reporting.
the client will have a profile with us: Account.
if the client has family members who need to access our services too, they will have profiles too, but we would like to link the family profiles somehow so if we open one of the family profiles we may see this member has other household members profiles linked to it.
Not sure if all this possible to be done with suitecrm.
I think your organization can use SuiteCRM to manage your organizaton clients. Howevere you should maybe change a bit your data model.
You could simple relate you contacts (making you Clintes’s representation the Contact module) to some Parent Contact in a 1 Contacts <-> * Accounts relationship.
But I think getting the Account module as a representaion of Clients Account an relate your Contacts to that account.
You could have more than 1 Contact relatated to the Account, (perhaps a Primary Cliente and a subpanel with all Contacts related to thar Cliente Account)
Can I relate contact with another contact? is there a mould or way to connect 2 or 3 contacts so I can, for example, create a new tab in the contact form: says: Related Contacts. once I click there I see the wife, and the kid’s contacts listed?
I think the Account is mostly for the main person - Company. but what happens if the wife and kids got divorced … etc.
So I think I will use only the contacts module for my clients, but not sure if I can connect contacts under a tab of family members.
Well you can do it but, in my opinion, the solution become more clear if you relate the contacts with a module that representes de “Family”. In las change, you could create a new module (Administration -> Module Builder) and associate a relation to the Contacts modules.
Usualy, the contact entity represents one person in real life. Some times it also representes company’s information. The Account entity represents clients account. As an example, imagine you have 1 person with 3 bank accounts, so you have one contacto related to 3 accounts. Or another example, you have a company with 2 acounts, you can have a contact related to 2 accounts.
But you can manage your data module as you consider the best way for your case.
Anyway, I once modelled families for a school simply by adding a contact-to-contact relationship. This relationship had a relationship field to say what the relationship was (wife, parent, son, etc.).
Then I used accounts to group them by class, and by school (it was one company which owned several private schools).
But there are many ways to do it, the solution JoĂŁo proposed also has its merits, only you can decide.
I wish I had the time to document my own solution in a blog post for the Community’s benefit, but I’m afraid I don’t. It’s not a quick thing to do