How do I relate an opportunity call to an account or contact?

[jspencer]

I am working on getting SugarOS 4.5.1g installed (patently waiting for 5.0) and have found a hole in the workflow as far as I can see it. I have repurposed the Opportunities module into a Proposals module. My workflow is as follows:

Items start as a Lead. These Leads have calls, meetings, and emails all recorded in the CRM until we find out if they want a price (quote). Eventually the Lead is either set as "Dead" if they aren't interested or it is "Converted" into an Account and a Contact (often multiple contacts). Assuming they are interested, we also create a "Proposal" price quote for them (using the opportunitys module).

The salesperson then continues creating calls/emails/etc linked to the person they are dealing with. These "events" then appropiretly "Roll" up to the account when viewing at that level. My thought is that all calls/meetings/emails should happen with a "person", and never be associated with an account directly or a "proposal". This leads me to my issues.

1) It seems that under the subpanel for "Opportunieies" (or "Proposals" for us) you can create calls/meetings/emails linked to the proposal. This is good in theory (so you know that a particular call related to this proposal), but then how do you know who the proposal was sent to or who you were talking TO about that proposal?

2) If you enter a Call/meeting/etc under an "Opportunity" (aka Proposal), it does NOT roll up to the account. This is crazy to me. If I am looking at an account, I expect to see ALL related calls/meetings/emails under the history subpanel, no matter if they are from a Contact or Proposal.

3) Expanding on the previous issues, how do I model an event (say a call) about an Opportunity (aka Proposal) to a Contact that works for an Account? The way it seems now I can only relate a call to one item, but in the real world everything is related. For example, there is currently no way to run a report to see all calls for an opporutunity grouped by the contact I spoke to (since a call can only be related to either a single proposal, contact, account, etc). I can see a salesman in our industry calling several people about a proposal, so it would be nice to see the process a sale takes to close (etc) without "hacking" something together using notes/custom field.

I've mentioned this is past posts, but is seems nobody wants this multiple relationship idea? I've given a hard look at CentricCRM and XRMS and they handle m-m relationships like this wonderfully (for several years at that). Why hasn't sugar done a similar model? We really need (infinite) Related To select boxes.

I still like Sugar better overall, but I don't understand this design decision...

[jspencer]

Bump. Nobody has a comment on this?

Is this limitation only present in the OS version? Does Pro/Ent allow m-m relationships?

[JWO112]

We use Pro and I'm not positive of the differences between that and the OS version but it seems there may be some additional functionality in Pro, with respect to this thread. Pro does allow m-m relationships but still not at the level you're looking for. What we finally did was add (via customization) a contacts dropdown menu on Opportunity/case/bug items (calls/tasks/etc) so when you schedule anything you have to choose a contact it relates to as well (the dropdown is populated with all contacts associated to the account) and subsequently the activities are logged on both the opportunity and the contact. As for the "account roll-up" it would just be extending the same concept a step further by displaying those objects on the account as well... A lot of redundancy in my opinion.
Just to share a tip though; you can avoid a lot of this concern through proper training. We've trained employees not make notes/calls/tasks/etc... on anything other than an opportunity/case/bug. Each of those are automatically related to an account and a contact (through the custom work) so we've actually managed to create a very manageable, organized web of relationships.
Hope this helps.
-Justin

[jspencer]

Thanks for the reply. The reason I asked about Pro was after re-reading my original post I kinda remembered something about the paid versions including better relationship abilities...

As for your suggestion, that is kind of what I planned in leu of an internal solution. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a way to do it without hacking the code to ease upgrades down the road (especially with 5.0 looming).

I did discover that part of my 3rd issue was incorrect. I originaly thought you could only relate an activity to one contact, and technically if you use the 'official' related to field you can't. The way around this is to use the scheduling Invitees area at the bottom of the activity edit view. This allows you to include everyone that participated in the call/meeting. It even shows the activity under each contact's subpanel area. The only minor problem with this is that when viewing the activity list under one of the attendees the 'contact' listed is the person you originally created the activity under, and it doesn't seem there is any way to change it.

Speaking of the official 'related to' select field, I think there is a bug in the 4.5x version when creating an activity from within a contact. It looks like the activity is linking to the contact's account, not to the contact itself. Is this how it should be working? Everything seems to work OK with this, but I wasn't sure if I should apply the 'fix' to SugarWidgetSubPanelTopSchedule_xxxx_Button.php I saw in another post.

Any chance you can post or PM me the steps/files you modified so I can save a little work?

If not I may take a similar but different approach and hack in a opportunity select (related to) button similar to the way you included a new contact select button.

Thanks for your input,