Customers vs Accounts

[moff40]

I'm new to Sugar, so please go easy on me...

Maybe I'm envisioning this incorrectly, but to me, "contacts" is like an address book, "leads" are potential customers, and "opportunities" represent potential sales (customers may be leads or existing customers).

Where I have trouble is with the "accounts" module. We are a travel agency, so our customers are mostly private individuals\families, rather than organizations, though we do have a few corporate clients. I see the default installation has the "Accounts" module set up for organizations, with "contacts" being a subset of people within the organization.

The "accounts module" contains many fields that are unnecessary when dealing with individuals or families, so what would you recommend as the best way to manage those individual customers? I was thinking of two options:

1./ I could duplicate the "accounts" module and use the duplicate to create a "Customers" module that's more suited to individual customers, and then use the accounts module for the few corporate clients we have.

2./ Modify the "accounts" module to contain only the fields we require, and track them all from there.

It seems to me that the latter would be the best option...

Another thought was how to track those "special" fields like kids' names, birthdays, anniversaries, etc - all those little "extras" that keep the customer coming back...

[salesagility]

It's important to note that SugarCRM is primarily a B2B CRM. It can manage B2C, but not elegantly

You should search the forums for b2c ... there have been many discussions over the years and there's some good advice.

As far as recording the extra information, either add it to each Contact record or build a new module using module builder