Really simple accounting/order mgt

[cbandes]

Hi -

I'd love to see even a very simple order/accounting module.

Even something very much like the existing "case" system, but with a field for price would be a godsend for me.

What I would love to see -

- Easy way to import an order from my ecommerce system
- Link to contact
- Items ordered, ideally itemized, but one big text box would be ok
- Prices, ideally itemized but total would be ok
- Date tracking - when order placed, when started processing, when shipped...

Short-term I'll probably hack something together using cases and a custom field or two. Long-term it would be wonderful to have something more robust/integrated.

[orzo]

Me Too!

Until this functionality is added to Sugar, I went ahead and copied the Opportunities Module and create a custom tab for orders. It holds up to 5 line items and it exports directly to Quickbooks. I track all of the shipments and backorders via the status and activities/history.

orzo

[manoj]

Me Too!

Until this functionality is added to Sugar, I went ahead and copied the Opportunities Module and create a custom tab for orders. It holds up to 5 line items and it exports directly to Quickbooks. I track all of the shipments and backorders via the status and activities/history.

orzo

Hi,

What about payment processing , shipping calculations and Taxes ? How do you manage these ?

Thanks

[orzo]

Excellent question!

In our case we receive orders from our website, over the phone, and in the mail. Some of our customers have to pay up front via a check or credit card and some have terms with us. In all cases the taxes and shipping are known at the time the order is placed. Once the order is placed, it goes into Sugar. So in most cases, our ecommerce system would have calculated the taxes and shipping costs in advance.

My main purpose for Sugar is for managing the order processing and retaining the associated history. Sugar allows us to keep current status and stage of the order along with the history of activities as we process the order. The history is there for reference as we interact with the customer in the future.

We use Quickbooks for accounting - note at the time of this posting, the on-line version of Quickbooks does not accept IIF file imports, which is the simple flat file format for getting data into Quickbooks such as new customer's, addresses changes, and new orders.

So all orders flow from Sugar to Quickbooks via our little php export utility. We use Quickbooks to generate the invoice, produce customer statements, track payment information, and print packing lists for shipment. All significant events are recorded in Sugar, like when payment has been received or when the item was shipped. Quickbooks is also our PO system, so if we need to coordinate a drop shipment or special order any items, we would track the specific there. Again, logging any significant events in Sugar.

I think about it this way - Sugar is for handling the products and Quickbooks is for handling the money. We publish information from one system to another instead of synchronizing information. In our case, Sugar is the authoritive source of all contact information. We publish it from Sugar to Quickbooks. All new information is entered just once, into Sugar, and from there it is published to Quickbooks and our Outlook addressbook and our PDA's...etc.

We do the same thing for Orders, RMA's, and Tracking Time on Projects. Yes, we actually journal billable project time and non-billable support time through a simple little interface that captures what we do for whom. This replaces the lame Quickbooks Timer program. This too is exported to Quickbooks. So when we provide professional services for a client, we set up a project in Sugar and start journaling time in our time-tracking application. We export these entries weekly to Quickbooks. The cool part is the data is only ever keyed in one time. It flows from Sugar to Quickbooks for invoicing. Not only that, but the history of activities remains in Sugar associated with the various project task. How cool is that? The sales team can actually see the daily progress of their projects via Sugar. What is even better is the time trackiing data is in Quickbooks too for really powerful job costing and reporting. We setup Quickbooks so that our time tracking flows to the appropriate accounts, so we have one heck of digital dashboard. Time spent even on various activities even shows up on the balance sheet where it belongs (per activity).

I do appologize if I overestimated your curiousity.

Merry Christmas!

orzo

[datamine]

Me Too!

Until this functionality is added to Sugar, I went ahead and copied the Opportunities Module and create a custom tab for orders. It holds up to 5 line items and it exports directly to Quickbooks. I track all of the shipments and backorders via the status and activities/history.

orzo

Any chance you would share that code you are using to export to QB?

[orzo]

Yes, I'll share. I'd like to see it out there. I've had a lot of people ask me recently. I was hoping it would become a part of Sugar or an Add-on module so we wouldn't have to maintain it by ourselves. What we have right now is definitely a good start. There are two parts, the time-tracking and the ordering. If I were doing this for a client, I would want to have our developers spend a little extra effort to make them clean add-on modules. I'd also like to document it. Let me contact the Sugar folks to get their perspective...

[atheimer98]

Great I'd love to try it out as well.

[mgsugar]

I too would like to try this out... count me in ;-)

[mfarney]

I would love to try this out. I am in a mixed environment using Macs and Pc's. We use quickbooks for accounting on a mac. Switching to a pc to get something like this working. Please let me know what I need to do to get these enhancements.

thanks,

mfarney [at] gmail.com

[hconnorjr]

your mods sound like they could be a really great addition to sugarcrm. correct me if i'm wrong, but it sounds like you are using the sugarcrm opensource, since you don't need to generate quotes or invoices from the crm. customers are well tracked by sugar, but when it comes to following the money, quickbooks does the work. also, it can generate any reports that you need.

i'd be very interested in this module. any chance you could post the code or maybe you should offer it as priced add-on. thanks.

michael