Re: CRM and LedgerSMB

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 7:40 AM, o1bigtenor <..hidden..> wrote:

Greetings

I had been using Kaddressbook to keep track of contact information for my network and have now gotten to where I have had a number of issues with same so am looking for a replacement.

There are some CRM aspects in LedgerSMB but what I was able to find was hard to find and to get to and wasn't quite detailed enough for what I want.

Is updating/enhancing/changing the CRM aspects present today in LedgerSMB on the radar?

It is on the radar. There is a lot we'd like to do here. The real issues are both ensuring that the changes meet real business goals and finding time to do the development. If you have ideas on what can be improved, please raise the issues here.

Here are things that are personally on my radar. I mentioned that I am building a rental module, but after that my next major addon I want to build is a customer/vendor portal which can handle ticketing and order entry.

This means being able to track tickets per customer or vendor (for example, support requests, requests for more information, etc), which itself would require better CRM functionality. For 1.4, in theory, customer todo's are supported by the database. They aren't currently supported by the front-end though.

The area after this that would come up is scheduling. That's a ways off. If you need something like that I would second Istvan's suggestion of egroupware.

Took a quick look at eGroupware and the price about scared me away from anything else.

Maybe I should delineate what I am doing and that might make things a little clearer.

We have a small farm which I am trying to move in the CSA (Customer Supported Agriculture) direction. This means that I am producing things myself and trying to sell to the customer directly. Some of that will be using Farmer's Markets but a lot of it is word of mouth and contact developed. This means that I have a disparate group of products with a common theme that they taste good (hearty bread(s), free run eggs, free run chickens, grass fed beef and am looking at producing sheep's milk cheeses.

All of that means that I get to do a lot of paperwork! (With much more on the horizon with the cheese making!)

I am looking at creating my own information systems re: cheese making but there is a lot of information used in the management of a dairy.

Had been using Kaddressbook but somehow there are some dependencies that are causing problems and I can't determine how to get rid of them (Debian testing) and in looking there really isn't a good contact system that I could find. Most of what I found hadn't been worked on for 5 to 10 years and the three I tried I couldn't get to install completely so if needs be I can use something like a spreadsheet (I am quite comfortable there) to get something that will let me keep a good contacts list. In a small business your contacts are very much important so that's why I thought I would ask.

Thanking one and all for their consideration!

Darald