Search results by user ID 5907

Re: Sharing Contacts across all Customers

fmf7 — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:57:01 GMT

Hi Angelo,

Thanks for coming back to me with those details and questions. In reponse to the questions posted in your most recent reply:

1 - Just a reference/link. Though I do need to be able to report on these relationships well. No scheduling or additional functions needed.

2 - I would like them to be in QuickBooks as well if there is no to very minimal additional effort. UBut ultimately, as long as we can implement and edit the relationships as well as report on them we'll be 100% operational, whether - in quickbooks or not.

3 - I can implement whatever way is easiest. Both satisfy the need, if they are both the same level of effrort then I would want to keep the roles table as clean and possible and just allow multiple records to share the role/relate type via a join table as we've both struck upon. But again, whichever way can be implemented quicker and easier will ultimately suffice.

Also, Can you quantify what you mean by "in-depth cusotmization effort", is this something that can be done with the tools available to me? Or do I need assistance/access to other tools?

Thanks again for your help. I look forward to confirming this solution can be built, and how to go about building it, so I can get the system fully online ASAP.

Re: Sharing Contacts across all Customers

fmf7 — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:32:23 GMT

Angelo,

The company is a home inspection business. The field service module is where we primarily live. There is only 1 customer per work order when the company is hired; however, there are several specific relationships that need to be tracked for each job/work order, including:

Buyer (the customer, can be a person or an organization) --this is already handled
Seller (can be a person or organization)
Buyers Agent
Sellers Agent
Buyers Attorney
Sellers Attorney
Vendors/subcontractors

The nature of the business is that most often times these contacts are the same across many jobs/transactions. So the buyers agent on job 1 may be the sellers agent on the next job; same for attorney's and the vendors/contractors. Because we are already in the work order and we have the contact (client), scheduling and other key features available 'out of the box', I'd like to be able to customize the screen/database to pull from a central table for the contacts as a many-to-many join with the relationship being defined as an additional attribute.

To give this a bit more clarity, here is a simple data structure that approximates the need (note, I understand the data layer can be structured many way, this is just to help represent/define the need):

Link Table

TableID (int/GUID, no null)
WorkOrderID (int, no null)
ContactID (int, no null)
RelateTypeID (int, no null)

RelateType Table

TableID (int/GUID, no null)
Relate Type Name (varchar/string, no null)
Relate Type Description (varchar/string, null ok)

I have tried to review the functionlality in the cusotmize tab and do not see how this data structure and interface are created, so I wanted to confirm it was doable before I invested moe time. Can you please advise on viability ofthis customization?

Thanks for your time and help.

Sharing Contacts across all Customers

fmf7 — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:28:23 GMT

Hi.

I am in need of the ability to link existing contacts to any customer within the field service module, and was hoping I could get some help from this forum.

Currently you must create the customer and then create the estimate/work order and if needed create contacts under the current customer; in my use-case I am going to have the same contacts/people used in the same or similar roles for many customers and I can't re-enter these poeple over and over.

To describe the need further: a job will come in, each job will only have 1 customer but it will have many peripherally related contacts (it's real estate related, so buyer, seller, various attorney's, real estate agents for both sidesm, etc). I need to be able to track how each peripherally related contact is related to this particulat customer for this particular job without having to re-enter these common people and organizations over and over for each unique customer.

Specific questions:

1. can contacts be shared across customers?

2. if not, can these contacts be entered as customers, but then related to a work order in a fashion that defines how they are related to said job?

Thanks in advance for your time and help.