Good OS CRM/Billing systems?

seamus

Right, just interested to see if anyone has any ideas for good open source CRM & billing systems?

Basically, I have a handful of clients and I need somewhere centralised/online to keep track of what they're buying from me, when I need to bill them, how much I've already billed them etc etc. I'd particularly like to hear from web developers/hosts who would already be doing this kind of stuff. At the moment, I just have a pile of excel sheets and pdf documents at home, which can be a pain in the ass when someone raises a query and I can't do anything about it till I get home. It's also not very structured

I've found Vtiger and installed it, which seems to be the dog's bits, but it's always worth putting the feelers out to see if anyone has found anything else?

mneylon

What level of automation do you need?

seamus

Any level would be nice. Ideally even automation/reminders for myself - e.g. "Customer X, yearly subscription is due in one month", etc. Vtiger allows you to create custom fields in the database, so there's no reason why I couldn't tweak it for this kind of thing, and then set up cron jobs to notify me based on these custom fields.

mneylon

http://www.phpcoin.com/ might be of help. I've never used it, but I know some of our clients do.

If you are doing a lot of hosting related stuff then modernbill or one of the other hosting billing solutions would be worth looking at:

http://www.whmarket.com/hosting-automation/billing-solutions/

seamus

Cheers mate.

glenrichkid

That'll do the job, not live online but by the sounds of things (monthly subscriptions etc.) you don't need to be up to the minute.
wll look after accs and manage your contacts - great for tracking customers etc.
Not expensive at all
Ring Sage, I dealt with a guy there in the sales dept. Ian something.

forbairt

I have to admit ... sage/act is impressive ... it just didn't feel right for me ...
Cost per license being one big factor for me ...

Since this thread started and a bit before I've been searching for a similar tool and haven't come across any that I truely like ...

[Want CRM + Time / Billing + Support helpdesk + simple + project management .... maybe I just want too much ]

I played with Tiger CRM thanks to this thread ..
Played with dotproject ...
In the end I almost went with SugarCRM ... has some nice features but feels a bit sluggish ... and looks like it'd require a lot of hacking to do some of what I want ....

What option did you go with in the end if you don't mind me asking Seamus ?

forbairt

seamus wrote:

At the moment, I just have a pile of excel sheets and pdf documents at home, which can be a pain in the ass when someone raises a query and I can't do anything about it till I get home. It's also not very structured

Google Docs and SpreadSheets online ?

While not .. the long term solution could be an intermediate one ?

seamus

What option did you go with in the end if you don't mind me asking Seamus ?

I'm slowly getting to grips with vtiger, it's what I went for in the end. PhpCoin looks nice for my specific purpose, but after consulting with my "business partner" we decided that vtiger was the better option in the long run.

I also looked at SugarCRM, but the install went a little buggy for me, so I left it.

It's a big application. Huge in fact. There was on main issue that I had with it - You have to do all of your customising *before* you start populating it (even before you start creating admin users), otherwise you end up not getting it looking the way you want it. For example, I customised what fields will appear in what forms (it comes with loads of useless fields) on a global level. Of course, because my account was already created, it had no effect, so I had to go and customise it all over again for my account.

It actually reminds me a little of SAP - you can install it and use it, but to use it the way you want it to work, you'll need to know a little about altering the program and the backend, or you'll need to pay someone who does.

frost

i've used ACT for a long time which is good, but i'm trying to find an OS web-based alternative. also for me ACT is overkill.

i have to agree about sugarcrm. i installed it a few weeks ago and have been using it on and off since then. slow and overloaded; took some time to go through and cut out a lot of the c***p that's in there by default, and even now there's still too much.

i just tried tiger for a few minutes, i'm sure i couldn't do it justice in that amount of time, but as with Sugar, it looks like there's a lot of functinality/interface to cut out.

my own requirements are more basic than yours i think (clients, dated notes and reminders would make me happy)

whatever you use, it seems to me that a simple quick interface with less functionality is better than all singing all dancing but hard to learn and slow. otherwise you just wont use it.