Thoughts on tracking invoices and payments

[superiorcr]

We are a service company implementing SugarCRM on the backend to handle all call tracking and customer relations...

These calls result in opportunities which then result in an appointment....

The usual result of the appointment is either an estimate or and invoice for the service performed... which is then tracked as a task....

Payment for these tasks is then tracked as cases.... there can be a case for partial payment , full , etc... custom fields have been created to track the payment amount and type such as cc or check or cash.... remaining ballances are tracked as additional cases that stay open until payed...

Considering the lack of ap/ar function in SugarCRM i believe this is a good way to relate all the necessary data to contacts, etc...

Also I came up with an interesting way to manage contacts as related to accounts.... We dont convert contacts to accounts but rather we have created only two accounts with their names representing the sales regions they relate to... for example a county or borough.... this way opportunities are related to both the contact and the parent account so we can track by region....

I am curious as to how others are handling these issues...

Right now all invoices and estimates are done the 'old fashion way' by hand... and we have a syntax for naming each 'job'... this job name for example a{date}-{jobnumberfortheday} is then entered in the subject of the appointment , the task and the case.... these papers are filed and can be pulled to be referenced by the job name...

My hope is to at some point be able to track each invidual item of the job as well and possibly use zuckerreports to generate a nice invoice or estimate... Right now we have no way of relating each item performed for a job in SugarCRM....

Any input or real world applications would be appreciated...

Good things to you all...

Thanks Sugar for a great product !

[longreach]

Feel free to check out how we integrate Invoices and Payments, and derive account balances. And link it all to QuickBooks if you like. See the demo at http://www.infoathand.com/ - may or may not be how you would choose to do it ...