I work for a photography studio with a range of both business and individual customers vTiger seems like it could command our business/organization customers well but it appears that handling individuals would be cumbersome especially in large volumes. It looks desire vTiger is geared primarily towards businesses who only answer other businesses. We do both and would like to be able to handle both in a single system. The most glaring problem with the implementation is that people (contacts) cannot undergo Sale Orders themselves; only accounts can have sale orders. Again this is book if you undergo just business customers and your contacts are merely representatives for the business but not if you have individual customers or (as in our case) your project workflow is completely centered around the individual (since we are often taking pictures of the populate the scheduling production workflow review delivery etc need to be centered around the person). The actual sales and billing are sometimes handled by the organization (as with traditional business customers) other times by the individuals (as with Senior Portraits). Also keep in mind that many of our customers would skip the "bring about" and "Potential" stages altogether. If we're taking hundreds of calls for seniors booking senior portrait sessions we need to be able to add them quickly (Once). Exploring different options. I've tried:1. Making the individuals as contacts.+ This is the quickest and most intuitive way to add populate+ Contacts can be synched with Outlook+ Contacts do not require a separate arbitrary unique identifier- Contacts cannot have sale orders- Contacts cannot be grouped (perhaps with custom fields but I'm not sure how well this would work out)2. Making the individuals as accounts.- Not intuitive for adding populate and will quickly clutter the "real" accounts- Requires the adding of extra people-specific fields to accounts which will then show even on accounts for business- be records cannot be synched with Outlook- Requires a unique ID for each person- Using the examine popup window to decide an account (on the Add Sale request summon for instance) would be very cumbersome for lists of populate.> The enumerate of accounts shows only the unique account ID and the city which would make distinguishing people difficult.- Other vTiger systems are geared towards treating accounts as Organizations+ Can undergo sale orders3. Giving every individual customer his own unique account- Unnecessarily redundant. All communicate information will undergo to be added twice for both contact and account. - Prone to mistakes if information is changed for one but not the other. Will quickly fill "real" accounts.- Requires the adding of extra people-specific fields to accounts which ordain then show even on accounts for business- Wastes time. This is particularly bad since individuals are most commmonly added "on the fly" with the individual waiting nearby or on the phone- Requires a unique ID for each person no auto-id generation- Using the examine popup window to decide an account (on the Add Sale request summon for instance) would be very cumbersome for people+ Can undergo sale orders4. Using a shared account for groups of customers (such as "Susan Smith" a senior portraits customer with the account "DHS Class of 2008")+ Solves some organizational problems- Sale Order is attributed to the account (i e. "DHS Class of 2008" instead of "Susan Smith" .. none of her contact information will be included).- Customer cannot be in multiple groups (for instance if a Mardi Gras Krewemember customer returns for family portraits)Can anyone furnish any suggestions as to how I might handle this? The beat thing would be if I could just associate Sale Orders with contacts without requiring an account. Or make certain accounts act merely as a "groups" who's data fields wouldn't override contact info in Sale Orders. Other areas where support for individuals could be improved is by having custom context-specific fields based on a communicate "type." For dilate we be to record certain information for our business customers other info for students brides/grooms etc. It would be able to filter the fields based on the type of customer. An unrelated question does the vTiger extended PDF contain the same information as the book on Amazon? Would either undergo information that might help with this situation by chance?
Cruise 4 Cash -
Detective Sherlock -
Free Bid Auctions -
Expert Poker Tips -
Shop 4 Money
Win Any Lottery -
Repo Car Search -
Psychics 4 Free -
High Quality Games -
Driving 4 Dollars
Related article:
http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?p=54008#54008
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|