I’m sure you all hear this all the time but I really cant thank you guys enough, as a SME owner I’ve been keen to help our teams with a system that lets them focus on delivering to our customer but costs quoted were just unfeasible and meant that I had to choose between keeping staff or buying a system.
Having our winning processes systemised and powered by suiteCRM will help us do both and more, it will help deliver a better service to all and that will help to bring in more revenue to be able to hire more staff and that hole created in the CRM market will go towards helping real people in the community.
Now while I have been thinking about transferring our current setup, and have came across a challenge.
alot of our accounts are related ie individual retail stores/regional store office and the head office group, is there any way to group together accounts in this hierarchy structure?
I have been thinking to maybe create 2 more modules called Regional Office and Head Office that have same setup as accounts with an extra set of field for grouping accounts and allocating contacts specific to the module.
Would anyone be able to provide a better practice model/suggestions we can implement?
Not to sound cynical… but for what reason are you attempting to group these accounts other than to create an association between individual retail stores/regional store office and the head office groups? You could use a drop down menu to create accounts as a certain type (for filtering purposes). I am not a fan of creating modules for creating modules sake. I guess I am asking if you need to capture any other data other than the association… hence the question… ping back when you can.
I’ll have a look at the dropdown of account type you;ve suggested to see if that’ll suffice
Just in case you’re aware of a better method I’ve put together a wee overview of how our relations tend to work (like you said we’d rather avoid customising too much as I dont want to break any links etc) The usual sales scenario for us is as follows:-
Head Office
Reg Office1 ----------- Reg Office 2
store1 store2 store3 store4
in this example, store1 and store2 have the ability to buy to a £1000 value…and if they need to buy anything at upto £10k level they need authorisation from a different contact under Reg Office1…normally if the Head Office releases a tender for larger contacts there will be another contact in procurement/director level so we’d like to be able to maintain relations at that level too…
After posting originally, I got a little more info and started to build parent child accounts through memberships so now I can link stores to regional offices
I was thinking to use this method to link regional and head office by creating a “parent” to “superparent” type memberships by linking them in the same parent child account method…but not had a chance to see if that’d actually work and give me the outcome that we need.
I’ll let you know how I get on and if you think I’m barking up the wrong tree ( I do that alot) then I;d really appreciate your input.