Viable use of OroCRM?

Before I get too far into testing OROCRM for my situation, I want to see if it is even a good fit for my scenario. I am wondering what the community thinks.

I am part of a team that provides supports to a number of international small businesses. This support ranges from simple record-keeping about their businesses to more extensive business consulting, from initial exploration through planning and startup and ongoing operations. My team does not do any sales at all, that is handled by others unconnected to our team, and so no pure sales functions would be needed. What I really need to do is maintain information about each of the accounts, contacts, tasks, scheduling, emails, etc. With so many accounts I am working with, it is hard for me to keep up with all the issues I need to. It would be good if I can have access to the other team members’ accounts, since I occasionally need to assist them (this is why I am looking at a centralized system).

It looks like OROCRM would be good, but here are some things I would need to customize to make it useful:

• I need much more information about each of the accounts such as business types (i.e. inc, llc, etc.), scope of business (i.e. consulting, education, training, manufacture, etc.), date of startup, date of annual registration, other legal details, financial information (not for my sales but their financial information–not accounting data but general numbers), their attorneys, their accountants, and much more information. We currently keep this in a simple flat database, but I would like to integrate it into a CRM (ideally eliminating the separate database). We would also want to filter and/or search on some of the custom information.
• Along with the above, it would be nice if I could have additional sections in the accounts pages that group certain information like: legal, financial, operations, etc.
• I would also want to customize the contacts to include various bits of information not included, such as education, certification, nationality and visa information, etc.
• It would be nice if I could set it up so that each client would have access to a subset of their own account information to update it themselves, is this possible? This is not a deal-killer, but would be a nice feature.
• I would want to modify the primary menus to eliminate unnecessary items related to sales and replace them with items that are relevant for our team. It appears that this is possible, but I just want to verify it.
• Can I setup different views that would allow me to see the accounts and contacts information in different ways, depending on the need? This would be something that I could quickly switch to, not reprogram each time.
• Can each user have a different view?

So, in essence, I want to add a lot of information in the records, I want to be able to filter and search on that information, I want to be able to report on that, I want to customize it to be more of a support system (not ticketing) rather than a pure sales system, and I want it to show information in a way that is more useful for us in our specific application.

I know that it will take time and work to add customized fields and customize the interface, but I don’t want to go down that path if I am trying to go too far with the system. I don’t have the resources to substantially reprogram key functions, but I can customize existing components if I need to.

Thanks for your help,
Clint

Topic

[Artem LiubeznyiSpectator]

Hi Clint,

Thank you for your interest in OroCRM.

Here’s a quick breakdown on your requests:

• Additional data for Contacts and Accounts. Easy to achieve—our Entity manager allows you to add all the necessary fields from the UI. And all this data will be available for search and filtering.
• Reporting on data. We have this built-in, but our reporting engine has some limitations so the fair answer is “it depends.” I can check for some crucial use cases if you want to get more detailed answer.
• Additional sections on Account/Contact views. Needs some coding to achieve, but no rocket science—all you need to do is alter page templates and you can use existing sections for activities or sales data as examples.
• Menu modifications. Same as the above. It is possible, but you need to code a bit.
• Different views for record data. That one is not so simple and really depends on what you’d like to get in the end. In the next release we will ship access control to entity data on the field level that will allow you to restrict the visibility or edibility of some data for specific user roles, and apparently it would solve some of your use cases. But if you want to create completely different views (as in “page templates”) and be able to switch between them, I’m afraid you’ll have to essentially develop a new feature from scratch. We have plans to do it ourselves, but not anytime soon.
• Record data availability for the clients. I think with the aforementioned field-level ACL you will be able to achieve that by creating a very restricted “client” user role that will essentially have access to their own account/contact records only. A pure client-accessible fronted part would be better solution, and our sister product OroCommerce provides exactly that, but we are yet to integrate it with OroCRM. (Currently scheduled for the end of this year.)

Hope this helps. If you have any other questions I will be glad to answer them too.

[Author]

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