Method:Classic General Q&A

Re: Customers are People? Organizations are what? Where are accounts?

m.mehr — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:17:38 GMT

I believe the ambiguity is ultimately because of how the QuickBooks customer record is designed, and Method was, of course, built around QuickBooks. A customer record in QB can be a person or a company, allowing Method/QB to be used in a B2C environment as well as B2B.

Re: Customers are People? Organizations are what? Where are accounts?

l.brandow — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:02:18 GMT

Coming from a background of ACT and Sugar, I had a hard time wrapping my head around how QB organizes this too. What helped me is adding the Company name field to the Existing Customers and Vendor grids in the old Method version. You don't need to do this in the new design. What's still weird to me is, a Customer is not required to belong to a company. Its not the end of the world. Just sort of weird to me.

Re: Customers are People? Organizations are what? Where are accounts?

Method_Michael — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:34:52 GMT

Hi JamesQ,

Also just to confirm have you upgraded to the New CRM? If not you may not see the option for contacts in Cases, Activities or Opportunities.

-Michael

Re: Customers are People? Organizations are what? Where are accounts?

Method_Michael — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:19:15 GMT

Hi JamesQ,

An account in Salesforce is the equivalent to a customer in Method. Each customer in Method can have multiple contacts. When creating a transaction in Method (Invoice, Sales Order Estimate) you would create it for the customer, just like you do in QuickBooks. When creating an activity, case or opportunity you create it for a customer's contact. Activities, cases and opportunities are still tied to the customer but they are associated to a specific contact for the customer. I wouldn't recommend trying to change this structure, because all of Method is built around this.

-Michael

Customers are People? Organizations are what? Where are accounts?

JamesQ — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:43:59 GMT

Not to stay stuck in Salesforce world, but can anyone shed light on how to handle Accounts and Contacts in MethodCRM? I am accustomed to creating a Contact as a child of an Account. An arrangement which seems intuitive to me. In thatway of thinking, the Customer is the Account, or the organization.

In Method it appears that the Contact is the Customer. Is this correct?

Is it a radical change to create custom tables to reflect the Account -> Contact structure? I know that I can make the tables but I want to make sure that Method CRM does not have some built-in functionality which I will be defeating by going this route.

Can anyone give me a basic run down on the relationship structure and reasoning behind how MEthodCRM is handling this information?