Help with a real case Scenario please. Can this be done in ERPNext?

ERPNext
1

Hi,

I’m testing ERPNext both v4 and v5 for usage in our company and to furthermore test if it can be used instead of a commercial application for potential customers but I have an issue when I try to implement it on a real case scenario we face.

For example,
we have a Marketing Agency who is our sales partner because they bring customers to us which customers we invoice directly and the Marketing Agency gets a commission. This Marketing agency also is our supplier because we outsource tasks we find tedious to them. The same Marketing agency is also our customer because they also outsource tasks they can’t do by themselves to us. Sometimes they’re also our lead because they contact us about potential customers but this is not important yet.

But where it gets more complicated is when it comes down to the contact person in the Marketing Agency, which is also our contact person within the companies that they bring as our direct customers. By that I mean that they undertake some Marketing jobs from their customers, and they contact us to do for example a facebook application. We discuss it directly with them on behalf of their customer and we also discuss with another contact from the direct customer’s company about the invoicing details.

To sum it up we have a company who is supplier, customer, sales partner and lead and a contact who exists in different customers and suppliers.

Currently the way I see it I have to create the Marketing Agency 3 times as sales partner, as supplier and as customer. Then I have to create the same contact X times for the number of customers we contact them about + 1 time for the Marketing agency.
Furthermore all the contacts I create which is the same real person must be saved under a name variant.
What’s more is that I can’t see a report of their activity grouped up together but instead I have to visit 4 separate places in the ERP.

This seems really weird so I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong and if there is a better way to do it. I appreciate your help in this matter. Thanks in advance for your time.

2

Hello,

Thanks for the detail explanation of your query.

Creating separate Customer, Supplier and Sales Partner will be required, as it will be needed when creating transactions.

For creating a common Contact, you should try following.

  1. Create a common Contact, and do not link it with any Customer, Supplier or Sales Partner.

  2. In the sales and purchase transactions, insert custom link field of “Contact”. You will need to insert custom field, because in the standard Contact field (under Contact Info section), result is filtered based on Customer or Supplier selected in that transaction.

With this, you will be able to select common Contact in your sales and purchase transaction. To check which all transaction this Contact is linked to, check Linked With option in the Contact master.

https://erpnext.com/kb/tools/check-link-between-documents

Let us know if that works for you.

3

First of all thank you for your fast response. I can see how a common contact will work so I will check on that asap. It seems like it can solve this issue.

But what I don’t understand with this limitation in the customer/supplier/sales partner entities how reports would work in that case to see an overall balance value and concentrated entries for a certain business partner.