Newbie looking for "Assignment" help

[Bonzocat]

Hi,

I'm a newbie to the whole CRM world. I'm giving Sugar a try. I run a tutorial company, and I'm trying to find an effective way to manage clients and tutors for multiple offices. I'm somewhat perplexed as to how to set up Sugar so that I can give access to data to the proper people.

Here's the situation and what I'm not sure how to handle:

First, we have multiple offices, and I want each office to have access only to the data for their clients. For example, if student Joe is a client of the New York office, the San Francisco office won't have access to his information. (The national office, on the other hand, will have administrator access to all the data, and will be able to transfer clients between offices if necessary.)

The first thing I'm confused about is assignments. Often, multiple tutors (users) work with the same student, so I'd like to "assign" the client to multiple tutors, but I've read that that's not possible. I want tutors to be able to log into the system and get information on all clients that they are working with. Sometimes those clients might be a list of students from a class, other times just individual students. So, I'm wondering how to do the assignments, and how to link tutors to their clients. I've thought about setting up each office location as a "User" and then assigning clients to each office, but then I'm unclear how to link multiple tutors to each clients so that when the tutors log in they can see a list of their clients. I've searched the forums, but haven't found a satisfactory way to do this...

As for Accounts and contacts: We often tutor multiple students from the same family, so I'm thinking about making the families "Accounts" with individual students, parents, etc. as contacts for each "Account".

I'd really appreciate any suggestions on a good, manageable structure for our business!

Thanks in advance,

Bonzocat (complete newbie)

[Angel]

You should take a look at the TeamsOS module. It will allow you to assign data to "Teams" of users, which essentially equate to groupings of one or more users. That will likely give you the assignment capabilities you are looking for.

Further info on that module can be found here: http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/teams-open-src/

and here: http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21060

As for your latter question re: Accounts, that would be about the best way to address it within Sugar as it would allow you to link any number of individuals to any given family name.

[Bonzocat]

Thanks so much! I'll look into it.