Hello,
I’m looking for some guidance on implementing SuiteCRM in an education environment. Specifically, I’d like to know how others have configured courses, sections, semesters, and enrollments. I imagine students and applicants would be contacts. Would courses be products? Contracts?
Any examples or demos would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
My suggestions, based on a system I set up a few years ago for schools (not universities):
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applicants are Leads
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actual students are Contacts
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Accounts are used to group students into classes and courses, with several levels (see multi-account belonging here: https://pgorod.github.io/Concepts-Accounts-Contacts/)
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Cases are also good to use for the enrollment process
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this didn’t include the school database of grades, that was a separate system. To do this in SuiteCRM would require a larger customization.
I recommend using some knowledgeable consultancy to migrate your data and get the concepts right, from the beginning. Tell me if you want to be contacted by SalesAgility about such a project. If not, just keep asking me questions here, and I will answer.
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Hello pgr,
Thanks so much for responding to my post last year. I confess that I didn’t realize I had gotten a response until just now. Sorry.
I’m attempting to utilize your suggestions and have a few issues…
How would I convert a Lead (applicant) to a Contact (student) without creating an Account?
We often have multiple students who work for the same employer which I assume would be an Account. We’d like to be able to market to the Account and get reports about the Account, but don’t want each student to become a new account when converting a Lead to a Contact.
Also, if we are to use Accounts to group students into Courses, how can we assign a student to multiple Accounts (one for each course plus their employer)?
I was thinking that Contracts might be a good basis for Courses, but it seems Contracts are tied to Accounts rather than Contacts. Is there a workaround for that?
I appreciate any guidance you can offer here.
Thanks.
When converting, there is no requirement to add a new Account. You can also just select a pre-existing Account.
If you use Account to group students in classes, like I suggest, then you should use a different concept for “employer”. You can add a different module for that, or reuse an existing module if you find it brings useful functionality.
Also remember that sometimes you don’t need a full-fledged module to express a piece of data, depending on how complex the data and its relationships are. For example, if your concept of Course is a simple one, maybe all you need it to store a string in a field.
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Hello,
Yes, I’m thinking I will need to add some modules. Your screenshot looks precisely like what I’m going to need. I have to get myself educated on creating a module. I’m working on this in my spare time, so the pace is slower than I’d like, But excited about the possibilities.
Thanks for the guidance.
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Yes, I created some new modules for our educated such as fee plan, payment plan, scheduled payment, students, classes, subjects, marks, attendance … and it is working.
Good luck
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Now I am also trying to implement this now there are a lot of methods for this. Besides this, I have to combine the suite with other applications, and I don’t know if it will succeed. I’m interested in how you did it because it’s been several years, and I’m interested in your modifications.
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