Tracking referrals per project

Quick background: We are a data recovery company. Clients are referred to us by partners of various types (computer stores, trade associations, etc). We are testing out ERPNext and so far we are loving it.

For each new client, we want to track who referred them to us so we can send them a referral bonus, and we also want to create a project for that client to track the steps we need to take (receive the drive, recover the data, mail it back, etc). It seems that projects and tasks are the best way to do this with partners and clients both being customers. Partners usually just refer business to us, but sometimes they require our services themselves. Should they not be “customers” and instead be something else?

My main question is, what is the best way to associate a project to a partner who referred the client to us? I see a way to associate a client to a partner, but we need to track it per-project. Should we use a custom field? I see a way to create them, what is the term for “relational field” in ERPNext? Or would we be better using something aside from projects & tasks for this workflow?

Bonus question: Ideally we would like to be able to generate reports in the future of which partners have referred us the most business. Is there something equivalent to views we can do this in?

Thanks in advance to anybody who can answer some or all of these questions :slight_smile:

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You can use the inbuilt features for Sales Persons/Partners:

https://erpnext.org/docs/user/manual/en/selling/setup/sales-partner

https://erpnext.org/docs/user/manual/en/selling/articles/sales-persons-in-the-sales-transactions

https://erpnext.org/docs/user/manual/en/CRM/setup/sales-person

These features have some standard reporting already associated with them which you can explore and see if it fits your needs.

As for creating a custom field, the steps would be as follows:

  1. Create a Doctype (master) for a list of referring partners

  2. Add a new link type custom field in Project. This is where you can select the specific partner.

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Thank you these answer my question perfectly!