Managing company names

[bobshan]

I am new to SugarCRM but have used other CRM products in the past. One of the biggest problems I've seen is correctly managing company names and company hierarchies so that roll up reporting can be done (total sales across all divisions in a customer).

I have a scrubbed list of company names, addresses, phone numbers. I want to load them into SugarCRM but the only place for them is under Accounts. The literature says to use accounts for customers. I want to preload this clean list and make users reference the clean names when they create leads, contact, opportunities.

Is there any downside to using the SugarCRM Account to store compnay names even though theya re not customers? I will differentiate customers as those Accounts with one or more opportunities statused as "Closed Won".

Note: I am the first user of SugarCRM in the company so I have the luxury of setting up rules on usage without impacting anyone else.

[kuske]

Account is THE object to store any company, customers, interested parties, partners, deliveres, a.s.o.

We use the field "Type" in accounts to differentiate all these companies. The field has a seelct box to be filled and some predefined values like "customer","partner","competitor",...

If you want to change the Type of an account automatically to "Custiomer" if an opportunity changes to stage "won" you can write a logic_hook (decription in Sugar WIKI) which sets this value to the account assigned to the won opportunity.

[bobshan]

Great. That;s what I was hoping for. But I was not sure since the SugarCRM User Guide specifically said accounts are customers. Without using the account object there was no other place to hold information on companies that were not customers. Since I sell mostly to large companies and leads/contacts are not useful for documenting company info, I was puzzled. The rigid description of account provided in the docs was misleading to me.

Thanks again
Bobshan

[kuske]

Yes it is a little bit confusing, but other Sales systems too - I came from SalesForce, there it was the same.
Accounts are objects with one ore two addresses having some contacts working for them.
So it can be a customer but even any other company too. There is no limitation.