Question about Accounts and Contacts

[sumanchaudhuri]

Is it a must to tie all contacts to an account? I know that for sales projections, it drives off accounts, but what if my business does not deal with accounts but more so with just contacts - for eg, if I run a tax service catering to individuals.

Can I get rid of accounts completely in Sugar (by hiding the accounts tab and removing accounts dropdowns from other screens in other modules) and still have it function properly? Will my sales projections now not work if I do not use accounts?

[longreach]

Opportunities need accounts - and the pipeline is based on opportunities.

The only solution I have seen adopted is creating an account name = contact name.

With modifications one could alter this model - but to do it properly would be a fair bit of work.

[phorvath]

I see you posted a comment similar to mine. THe issue of tying these two categories together has been a long-term outstanding comment/question about this application. At one point they were going to remove the requirement to tie these two together. I waited about 9 months now since I was told that, reviewed the demo and discovered that Sugar still has this built in limitation and ties it more strongly to business sales versus consumer sales. Changing it over to use accounts as consumers would be a challange from my perspective too. WOuld be nice to have it work both ways.

[Oracledarren]

Just noticed yoiur comments above and would like to point out that most crm applications today are based on the business to business model and not business to consumer.

What I would think about doing in your situation is to create a bucket account i.e. called indivuals and attach each of your clients to it.

It is not an ideal solution but you could still then generate opportunities to it and each opportunity could then have the relevant contact attached to it.

The only I can see in doing this is how you handle the reporting, that would probably have to be done as a bespoke add on using a third party reporting tool although the pipeline report would still be accurate as far as I can see.

Hope this helps you guys.

[phorvath]

I didn't realize taht B2B CRM was more prevalant than C2B, I read all these good things about Sugar and when i look at it the application isn't quite there for C2B. KNowing that B2B is the concept is a good indication of why it lacks the C2B features. Why not do both though? I work for a bank, there's lots of banks out there for Sugar to make this work, I'd hope. Your work around is an interesting approach. It sounds more feasible than and account as a household approach. I got mixed in with another thread regarding this same thing, this was my post regarding Accounts as Households:

I have been contemplating the concept of Accounts as Households and Contacts as member of the Household (Accounts). I am going to play with that a little bit and see if it flows, a few versions previous and the flexibility was not there. I have to consider tying campaigns to Households, so with that in mind the campaign feature must work with Households. It appears that Account name is in the create target, so is customer name, do those tie back to the contacts? I'm not asking you these questions, but they are valid questions if one were to consider Households in place of Accounts and how the functionaility falls into play. Sugar keeps getting rave reviews, I read the recent article about a customer moving from Salesforce.com to Sugar. With moves like that coming their way it would be nice if they would help address this from a consumer CRM view as well as the current, the current works for business CRM.

I guess I'll have to try both of these ideas and see what I find with the flow of data under each circumstance.

thanks for the input!