Can SugarCRM track sales, stock, orders, expenses…?

[Noah]

I am looking to use SugarCRM OS to help manage all aspects of a non-profit association. It handles time management, contact information, etc… very well from what I can tell.

In order to fund our association we make and sell some different products. The only thing that it is missing is the ability to track stock, customer orders, sales, and expenses. Am I wrong? Is there something I am missing? Are there modules that can bring some of these features?

[johnol]

Sugar Open Source doesn't have any order tracking ability in it nor are there any modules that presently support this kind of feature.

Sugar Professional has *limited* order tracking... specifically it has the ability to create a catalog of items for sales and to issue Quotes / Orders... however it is *not* a replacement for a true accounting system and doesn't support any advanced order entry features.

We use the Portal in Sugar and then use a full function Open Source accounting system called Aria to handle all accounting. In this way, you can be "in" Sugar when accessing that info. Area has various security levels so folks doing "order entry" don't have access to the complete set of books.

The downside to this method is that customer records live in two separate data schemas - both in the core database for Sugar and in the data for Aria.

But, let's be realistic. Since Sugar only has limited order tracking capabilities anyway - you will be stuck doing double entry on everything that is ordered anyhow.

With this in mind we elected to minimize the input on Sugar and just track sales from beginning to end in Aria.

Aria is based on the Nola Accounting platform. Development stopped on Aria but it is quite a robust and stable system. If you want the latest and greatest version, Nola is still under development and is fully supported. Again, the Portal method works great regardless..

ARIA - http://sourceforge.net/projects/arias (Open Source)
NOLA - http://www.nolapro.com/ (Not Open Source, but very inexpensive for professional accounting system.)

Hope that helps.

-John

www.progresspays.com

[aiscom]

I found your thread because I'm also looking for a way to track expenses. Currently we're looking at using the History tab to make a note under a project. But it's not ideal.