I have used a number of CRM systems within the Finance Sector. This week I decided to explore using SuiteCRM.
On the website it says that the SuiteCRM caters for the Financial Services industry too. Yet when I installed the system and looked within it I cant see even the basic functionality I need such as backoffice client approval functionality, client area, client deposits/withdrawals section, even a password field at the form builder.
Is there a way to set the system up for Financial Services? For instance a template or a setting at the account level? I read about “Industry Type” in the forum but the information did not help me and I decided to ask here.
Hi and welcome to the suite-community!
You probably have to create some custom modules to fulfill your needs. From my perspective, Suite allows you to manage your leads/customers and opportunities/invoices/quotes/contracts.
Included as well are currency fields that can include different currencies and their exchange rates.
If you need your customers to interact with the CRM, you could either grant them very limited access to the records they should see (a bad approach in my mind) or add a customer portal, e.g. joomla. At this point you will need to have a developer who is able to use the API and set up the synchronization (there is a plugin available for joomla <-> suite, but it is very limited in regards to what is being shown in the portal).
There is also a web2lead-form generator, but I guess it doesn’t cover your use cases.
Default SuiteCRM does not have a lot of field-specific features, but since it is open source and very flexible you can integrate it with just about any system used by the company (if other systems just have a usable API).
I’d assume it wouldn’t be too difficult to integrate it with other systems to e.g. track deposits and withdrawals or, if you’re just using one client funds account, to create a custom module to track that. Customer portals are fairly easy to implement too, but will require extensive work on your part (either yourself of subcontracted) to get it up to speed. There are a few ready made products (free and non-free), but I’d assume compliance with local laws would still require customizations to e.g. authentication measures.
But SuiteCRM is very powerful and extendable. We’ve customized it to work in the legal field to, in addition to keeping track of client interaction, track matters, client funds, billable hours, electronic invoicing etc. There’s very little you couldn’t do, but to do more than basic CRM, sales and project management functions you’ll need to invest time and/or money for development. Right now you probably should wait for the release of v8 before starting such projects, though, just to avoid redundant work.