Can I achieve this? If so... HOW? :)

[ditman]

Hi there, I've been using for some time, and found out some great modules to achieve things I thought that couldn't be done without coding (thanks for saving me time )

But I've come across a problem that I don't know how to solve as of yet:

I need to control ""suppliers"" (call them whatever you want, in the end they should be some sort of contact or account), which would be associated to an account.

Imagine someone wants me to get them pineapples, and then I contact with X pineapple suppliers, so I associate those suppliers with the person who asked me for pineapples in the first time.

Fine, and then I'd also need to know the people that I'm linking to each supplier somehow :S

Is that possible? I need that but don't know how to get it

Thanks!!

[pterrell]

An Oppurtunity can be associated with multiple accounts. So if you have an Account for a customer and create an associated Oppurtunity for the their desire to purchase pinaples, you could associate the Accounts of the suppliers to the Oppurtunity.

Where I see this breaking down in your example is that you are going to buy 100 pineapples from ABC Company and 50 pineapples from DEF Company to fill the request by XYZ Company for 150 pineapples. I would think that you would create two Oppurtunties, one for the 100 and one for the 50.

I've got a business tracking process going that links a single oppurtunity to several suppliers, but each supplier offers its own "product" (or service in this case). I've created custom fields particular to that "product" to track in the oppurtunity.

[ditman]

Opportunities look nice for this, and then fine-tuning them would be great so we can add any additional fields we want

The question is... ¿Can I find out in which opportunities is a given Contact involved?

Thanks!

[pterrell]

Oppurtunities can be associated with Contacts as well. The oppurtunites then show up in the contact's list of oppurtunities. But when you look at the list of Oppurtunities, you would not see the contacts, nor do I know of a built-in way in SugarCRM to see the contacts.

The model that SugarCRM uses is that Accounts are the "company" and contacts are the "people" that work for the business. So XYZ Company would be the account with an associated contact of Fred Smith the fruit buyer. So Fred is ordering the bananas, but your selling them to the XYZ Company.

If you're selling to individuals and you don't want to recode SugarCRM, you'll need to create accounts for the individuals. Either drop making a contact for the individual or make both a contact and an account. In my case where my company is selling some products to individuals, I have the individual's "personal" info on the Contact (birthtdates, hobbies, spouse, and the like) and individual's "business" info in the Account (like the Social Security Number).

My work around when SugarCRM doesn't have a way to see information the way I want to is to use an external reporting tool. I'll whip up a query in Microsoft Access that links the info in the various tables and either export it to Excel or create a report in Access. I'm exploring various PHP-based reporting tools so that my users can get their own reports when they want.