Displaying People not Companies

[adammills]

Dear Community,

I work in a business which sells to people not companies, is there a way to make Sugar CRM people centric, rather than company centric. This is critical to the way my staff can use Sugar CRM.

Is this already possible?

Am I missing something?

[leenwebb]

Uh, I think we're gonna need a little more here. In what ways is Sugar too company-centric? What exactly are you trying to do?

I don't really care about the Accounts aspect of Sugar, either, and I personally am not really having too many problems making Sugar match my contacts-centric way of doing things. But I have no idea what you want, so I don't really know what help I can offer right now.

Eileen

[adammills]

Apologies Eileen if you felt I was being a little vague.

I have set up SugarCrm, however it appears that in tracking leads, sales, pipeline etc. Only the company field is used. I however work solely with people, John Smith, John Doe etc. who's company information I am not privvy too as I am trying to sell them as people, boats, cars etc.

Am I using it wrongly, or do I need a patch of some sort in order to change the way SugarCRM things about accounts (customer records).

[leenwebb]

Ah, that makes more sense. Most of those modules don't just use the company field, but it is a key part for many of them. As far as I know, there's not any sort of 'patch' or plugin that will change all of those fields in one fell swoop. I suspect Sugar is designed that way because most people use it that way.

I can think of two directions for you to go:

1) Dive into the code and wrestle with all of those modules until they do exactly what you want them to do. This would take time and energy, but you'd end up with exactly what you wanted (hopefully).

2) Enter in your people as Accounts (and ignore the entire "Contacts" tab -- even remove it if you want). In Studio, you can adjust the fields to match a Contact (take away stuff like "Stock Ticker" and "Annual Revenue", and add in any people-centric fields you might use like "Birthday"). Then just use the account-centered Sugar as it was designed, easy-peasy. Not everything will be perfect, but it could be the answer to most of your issues.

Good luck!
Eileen

[simple]

2) Enter in your people as Accounts

Hmm, this might not be the best solution because Sugar does not allow to use accounts in target lists (campaigns) and you can't schedule meetings and invite an account...

Another solution (not tested!) could be to use the contact module, add custom fields if needed and let Sugar manage the accounts "automatically" using business hooks. This would allow only one-to-one relationships! But I think you could accomplish this by adding business hooks to the contact module. Whenever you create or update a contact the business hook logic creates or updates an account and the relationship. So you would have to manage only contacts but could use also modules which are based on accounts.

More (developer) infos about hooks:
http://www.sugarforge.org/content/us...php?event_id=2
http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/deassign/

Not tested either but with Pro/Ent you might be able to this only using workflows...

PS: An extra module which allows to manage accounts and contacts as one object could be a useful addon for alot of small companies or companies who want to use SugarCRM only for certain processes. But I don't tink such a module exists...

[kpit]

You can use the system without accounts. you will have to edit the config so that accounts are not requrired.

open config.php and look for the following.

'require_accounts' => true,

change the true to false.

'require_accounts' => false,

[adammills]

Wow is it really as simple as that! Thank-you!

I can't have been the first person in this position, are you missing out on a trick here maybe?

Adam

[adammills]

Okay, that entry allows you to create a lead not associated to an account but doesn't then allow you to associate it to a contact.

I think either need to change accounts to look like contacts or for the program to see contact as accounts?

Sounds like a huge undertaking?

Adam

Any ideas?