Question for Vtiger users.

[Fixedathome.com]

I'm having a play with Vtiger at the moment and so far I'm liking what I see. I'm a little unsure of the correct set-up for Accounts and Contacts though.

My business is split into 3 groups:
Residential
Business
Family & Friends

Do I create an Account for each one of these and then assign each contact to the relevant Account?

Or should I create an Account for each entity whether business or domestic even though it is likely that there will only be 1 contact per account, meaning that I will likely just be entering the same info twice.

I'd be interested to hear how others have it set up

 

[DavidF]

I assign accounts by business name, then I assign individual's contact details to the appropriate account name. IE: Joe Bloggs & Jill Bloggs are assigned to BloggsCorp.
There is nothing to say you have to use accounts, but it might be a good idea to start now to save a lot of revising in future.
For our circumstances, using accounts makes it easier for others in our business to find a contact. Say I ask my offsider to email the manager of BloggsCorp, neither she nor I have to even remember his name. You go to BloggsCorp Account/More Information/Contacts and find him/her there.

 

[NeutronTech]

Not to mention you can pull up a customer's history with you, you might use it later on for marketing, you can see reports that will show you what sectors and repairs of your business are the most profitable, the list goes on and on. I think one of the single most important things to do to run a successful business is good, detailed records.

If your intention of having 3 different accounts is to have 3 different pricing levels, then I would either set up tiered pricing properly, set up discounts to change the normal price to the family price or whatever, or create different non inventory items for the 3 different customer types (ie. Labor, Residential Labor, F&F Labor).

Doing this you can still categorize your contacts by groups. When you create an invoice you should be able to create a customer right there. Then when editing the details, you should be able to select a group or sub group.

 

[Fixedathome.com]

Thanks guys. Pretty much as I thought.
I've been running for near on 5 years and have good records for everything I do. I'm just trying to get everything under one piece of software rather than using different software for each.

 

[iptech]

For residential accounts I enter them all as contacts but group them under a generic "Cash Sale" account.

For business customers I set up an individual account for each company and then use contacts for departments & contacts.

For family I would set up a family (or families if you want break it down for in-laws etc.) account and then list individual family members as contacts.

 

[Fixedathome.com]

For residential accounts I enter them all as contacts but group them under a generic "Cash Sale" account.

For business customers I set up an individual account for each company and then use contacts for departments & contacts.

For family I would set up a family (or families if you want break it down for in-laws etc.) account and then list individual family members as contacts.

Cheers for the reply Iptech. That sounds like the way to go for me I think.
I know you've mentioned the Timecards module and the Outlook plugin in your previous posts about Vtiger. Are there any other must have modules?

 

[NeutronTech]

Every one of my customer's has their own account. I keep notes of the work I do for them, notes, and notes on phone conversations. But right now I'm using QBO and keeping track of invoices and account notes in that, and have an Access database set up for work orders. The only reason I do that instead of putting the work information in QBO, is because when I enter the customer information in my Access DB, it prints out a work order with all the terms and signature lines. I have been looking at several CRMs, but I haven't decided on one yet.

I'd like to eliminate QBO and my access DB, and use a CRM for it all, but I'm having trouble finding one that is intuitive and easy to use. Also I don't need a ton of the features in most of the full CRM apps. I really just need a simple, basic CRM which I haven't found yet.