Migrating from ACT to Sugar - contacts or accounts

[kparadis]

Newbie here, busy reading the SugarCRM for Dummies books and looking at our ACT 7 database and shaking my head.

We sell one product (satellite Internet) with 4 different packages, mostly to home users. Some of these users may buy 2 systems, or want one system billed to their company and one to their home account. Some of these customers are members of national organizations, so they get a discount and we want to track that they are part of this referral group.

In our ACT, we are using Contacts for each customer record. We have lots of other custom tabs and fields set up under these contact records for billing/customer issues, etc.

My question is, would I set each person up as an Account in Sugar? Or would I ignore the Account tab and try to customize the Contacts tab in Sugar to reflect the important fields in ACT? If we hook up some sort of billing module, does that attach to the Accounts section or the Contacts section?

I'll keep reading and messing around with this, but I appreciate any thoughts/ideas on my issue.

[sugarcane]

Hello,

SugarCRM by default is Account centric. As you have probably noticed, most of the other modules require the Account. You have a few options:

Some of these users may buy 2 systems, or want one system billed to their company and one to their home account.

-you could use the existing structure and use the Accounts module to hold the 'Household name' or Company and then use the related contacts module for each person's contact info for that one family/household or contact at that company

Some of these customers are members of national organizations, so they get a discount and we want to track that they are part of this referral group.

-here you could use the 'member of' relationship on the accounts module. Or if there is a rather static list, you could always create a custom dropdown or multiselect field.

In our ACT, we are using Contacts for each customer record. We have lots of other custom tabs and fields set up under these contact records for billing/customer issues, etc

-We are currently performing an ACT migration for a client of ours where they have no use for the Accounts module. So we have removed the required account fields and just customized the Contacts module. This just depends on your business model. Either way, you can create custom fields to hold all of your data. Or if you want the tab structure like ACT, this would need to be customized

My question is, would I set each person up as an Account in Sugar? Or would I ignore the Account tab and try to customize the Contacts tab in Sugar to reflect the important fields in ACT? If we hook up some sort of billing module, does that attach to the Accounts section or the Contacts section?

As stated above, we would need to know a bit more details before recommending the best approach (use the accounts module or do away with it). In regards to the billing module, are you wanting to integrate with an existing system you have? Or do you want to upload a billing module within the CRM? You might actually want to check out Info@Hand -- this is a system built on the SugarCRM platform, and has a billiing/invoicing module that comes with the system, as well as a products module. It also allows you to select a B2B or B2C model, so this might better suit your needs.

We would be more than happy to discuss your business process and needs in more detail, please feel free to contact us.

[kparadis]

Thank you for the quick reply and helpful insight! I will check out the billing component. Right now, as I am going through ACT to see what all is in there, I am noticing there is a lot of extra stuff we just don't need. I will definitely keep you in mind if this project moves forward. I am sure we will be looking for some help with migration/integration.

-Kelly

[SergeiLo]

Hi Kelly,

We used Apatar open source data integration ETL tool l to migrate accounts, contacts, email history, notes from ACT! to SugarCRM. You may try it out as well its free to use and download.
www.apatar.com or www.apatarforge.org

Regards,
Serge