account product opportunity relationship

[raynor]

hi

we are running sugar professional 5.0.2e.
i have a dev environment to experiment with, and a production one fully loaded with all our accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities.

we are trying to work out the best way of handling products, and how to link them to accounts and opportunities.

we have the list of products for the catalog, with type and category.

we do not want to use Quotes. We found it waaay to slow to create the opportunity, then the quote, and then manually add the products to the quote. We have our own quote process. We will probably just attach our quote pdf to the opportunity as a note. And typically the list of products changes dramatically by the time we progress from Opportunity to the final sale of products.

So far, we were planning on directly adding the product to the account.
That way we get a simple list of products that the customer has purchased.

But it would be great to somehow associate the product with the original opportunity.

How is the best way of doing this?
Do we create a new relationship between Products and Opportunity? I assume it would be a many-to-many relationship.
That won't create a new instance of the product, will it?
We only want the one product to appear under the account.
It would just be good to be able to search/see which opportunity that product sale came from, or what products came from the opportunity.

I'm wary of playing with relationships, because you can't undo them.

I know we could just add a free-form text field to the product, saying which opportunity it was from, but that is at the mercy of the operator.

cheers
Chris

[salesagility]

Chris ... these forums are for the community edition

For support for the proprietary paid for editions, you'll find more people who know the proprietary extensions in the pro and ent forums