CRM functionality

ERPNext Selling/CRM
1

Hello everyone!

One of my main needs for the time being is CRM.

I was just curious, does anyone here have any experience here using EPRNext as a CRM tool first and foremost? (with the added benefit of course being integrated to an ERP)

Kal

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2

Hello Kal,

I do agree, as you quoted of CRM need. All the company where ERPNext is installed, they primarily use CRM module. In fact, we use extensively ERPNext throughout our organization.

Let me know in case you have any clarification about CRM.

Sunil
Nescode (http://nescode.com)
Partner for ERPNext

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3

I would be another intent listener for how people are able to use erpnext as a good crm, I thought the crm module is weak in here.

I would like to know how people are using ERPNext for CRM purposes so that we could try and use it at our end as well.

4

Hi Sunil,

How are your customers using the CRM in ERPNext?

Do they use it for tracking sales opportunities (leads), setting sales opportunity criteria (and following it, registering interactions with customers, and generating sales pipeline reports?

Kal

5

You can check Umairā€™s video on how we use CRM at Web Notes:

6

Good this presentation is shared for refreshing our memories, but if you see that you people donā€™t do follow ups with leads or customers but this is not the case with every other organisation.

In most of the organisations the people do rigorous follow ups and it is that part of the CRM which is missing in erpnext.

I think it is high time that the system ensures a valid follow up has been done with the lead or with the customer regarding a particular task at hand.

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7

I do agree with aditya, scope is there to improve current CRM module in ERPNext.

But at the same time we do n-number of follow-up using CRM and it works very well in terms of reminder, calender, SMS to customer, assigning task to others etcā€¦

Sunil

8

I havenā€™t really received a conclusive response on this. I will set up a few ERPNext databases and play around to get what I need running. The following is a base list of what I need:

  • Have separate databases for projects
  • Each project will have prospective clients who are completely separate groups that cannot conflict
  • The information that needs to be stored is basic (company name, decision timeframe, probablity level in %, $ value, products and services being proposed, new lead or not, notes
  • Reports based on the aforementioned

Feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated as I am in the process of configuring the software to achieve these tasks. Thank you!

9

Hello @runbird, I am very interested to hear the results of your investigation. What was your conclusion? Were you able to use ERPNext CRM? Did you end up using a dedicated CRM?

Also, if anyone has recently integrated ERPNext with a dedicated CRM, could you please generally describe the justification for the integration, and how successful it was?

Even though ERPNext has functionality for CRM, eCommerce, website construction, project and quality management (e.g. Kanban boards), should this be considered minimum-viable-product-type functionality only? For advanced requirements, is it generally ā€œbetterā€ (ā€œbetterā€ often meaning less costly) to integrate with a stand-alone application? ERPNext has built-in eCommerce functionality but also it has a Shopify integration. Is CRM a similar situation?

Fwiw, I am also interested in timesheets for engineering project management, ERPNextā€™s built-in timesheets seem best suited for capturing time in a manufacturing process, and a weekly or twice-monthly grid-format timesheet common in engineering departments is not provided. Has anyone implemented weekly or twice-monthly timesheets in ERPNext, or integrated with a stand-alone timesheet application?

Cheers,
Dale

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10

Hereā€™s what Iā€™ve done:

  1. I tend to use a more robust specific CRM tool like SuiteCRM as the primary ā€˜CRMā€™

  2. Then, I integrate the data into erpnext via the frappe api, and then drive the sales process through the api in erpnext.

Typically in my use cases the only UI users of erpnext are people needing to generate reports, get accounting info, etc. The rest is integrated with other applications. I use the API to create and trigger quotes, sales orders, invoices. I do billing outside of erpnext.

This may seem counter to what many people assume or do with erpnext. But since integration of systems is very easy for me, I find erpnext to be a great ā€œERPengineā€ via api with the bonus of a UI.

I have not yet had experience scaling this ERP engine approach up to many tens or hundreds of thousands of customers served. However, with the right design and systems in place to maintain, secure and scale, there is no doubt erpnext and the other tools I am integrating would handle it.

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11

Thanks @Sam_Rose. You have been very informative!

If I understand you correctly, your use of ERPNext is as a kind of central transaction workflow engine, that point-solution type tools hook into as a common source of truth and workflow. Is that reasonable?

What other integrations have you done with ERPNext besides CRM/SuiteCRM? Timesheets? eCommerce site? Payment processing center?

Do you mind sharing some of your background? Why do you say integration is very easy for you? Is it skill, interest, or both? How many years have you been doing this? How many ERPNext integration projects? How do you find clients? (or do they find you?). Your profile says you joined 18 hours ago, but I suspect you have been using ERPNext a little longer :wink:

Iā€™m new to ERPNext and new to consulting (my previous background has been mostly leading engineering teams developing or manufacturing high-tech industrial gadgets), and Iā€™m very interested in how one could build a business providing business solutions with ERPNext as the core (or maybe you see SuiteCRM etc. as the core?).

Thanks,
Dale

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