Sorry, but these are very basic questions - SuiteCRM is clearly a very powerful and configurable product. I just want to make sure that it’s not overkill for my needs.
Before I spend some serious time learning how to get it set up for my needs I’m looking for a community sanity check…
We’re farmers in a niche market. We have about a hundred customers for stock as well as various suppliers and partners.
The big use-case though, the one that has made me realise that we need something better than our accounting software, spreadsheets and Trello is our commercial shearing operation.
This year, we will be shearing at over 200 properties, we need to record customers, handle enquiries and book visits to a calendar that will allow us, on the road, to see locations, schedule, number of animals and extra fields (do we need a generator, are there access issues, notes from previous visits etc).
Location maps would be great, as would reporting by year on headcount, visits, time per location/per head etc.
Am I going to find that Suite is the right product?
I’ve broken down what you have asked and I think I have cover everything, but if I do miss anything out or have any more questions just ask
You can record all you current customers in the Contacts module and associate them with their company in the Accounts module
You can handle enquiries by creating them as leads in the Leads module they can then be converted over to contacts when ready.
You can book your visits into our Calendar, where you can associate that with an Account and Location. From there you can schedule further events, If you associate that account to the calender event, in that account you can create custom fields through Studio from the Admin panel where you can store how many animals they have, if you require a generator or if they have access issues.
In the Accounts module there is a sub panel named History, here you can store all your notes from previous visits to ensure you never lose your note or who they’re associated to.
All this can be accessed when you’re on the road as long as you have an internet enabled device and can connect to your instance.
You can create a report in the Reports module to display all you the information you would like as long as it has a field to connect to
Location maps are also in Suite in the Maps module but currently aren’t working as expected in 7.7 but it has been reported and logged so should be fixed soon in a future version update. However they seem to work in 7.6.
Thanks Cameron - sounds like it’s able to tick the boxes and should be worth the effort. I’m sure that there will be many more newbie questions over next couple of weeks
Well, that didn’t last long before I hit the first follow-up question…
Cameron said:
Much of this customdata relates to the job rather than the account. So, as an example, if I’ve got this right:
Account: Old McDonald’s Farm, Contact: Bill McDonald Campaign: Shearing 2016/17 Event: Date/time;Location; Headcount; Duration; Special Requirements
So, the relationship model looks something like:
Account-Contact: One -> many
Contact-Event: One -> many
Campaign-Event : Many -> Many
So I think that the new fields go into event as we may make multiple visits to the same account in the season (this happens regularly when the client needs to have some animals sheared in October and the rest in February)
I’m also not sure about the many-to-many on Campaign-Event (I have a CompSci background and many-to-many relationship make my teeth itch). A shearing visit my also be part of a stock-sales campaign - can Suite support that?
I’m also a very new user… If we sell a service so subscription based so they pay for 12 months of support… Where would I record this…
I see opportunity but I don’t see how and where would would convert to sales and track them?
if they have a one year support package and they call for support I would like to use freshdesk for our ticketing but how would we see how much time they have left on their support?
Or say they buy product XYZ and it comes with a 5 year warranty where do we record that info ?
Perry:
If you use the play about with a few modules and adding new fields that link to the account everything you suggested should be possible, but you would need to spend some time customising it to make sure you get exactly what you would like.
ttarabelli:
You can record all of that in the Contracts modules, this will let you keep track of which account has what type of support and when it expired/ needs to be renewed. If they buy a product with a 5 year warranty you can add this in a variety of places. You could make one in the Contracts modules with the start and end date of the warranty and link that to the product or alternatively if that product automatically comes with the warranty you can customise it to have the start and end date of that warranty.
If you would like to keep track of how long the support has i suggest looking at something like time sheet modules/addins
Either: https://store.suitecrm.com/search/1/timesheet/
or https://suitecrm.com/forum/suitecrm-7-0-discussion/546-time-sheet-module
