6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

[AN-Tech]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

How about number 7 on Ray's (5 on Luke's)? We desperately need the ability to create contracts in CommitCRM that match those with out customers. We have too much billing complexity and issues because we can't get CommitCRM to mark things billable or not per the customers contract with us.

This is at the top of my list for enhancement. The tech should not have the responsibility or ability to billing aspects of a ticket.

[Support Team]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

Some enhancements in regards to this are indeed on our list. Thanks for asking.

[AN-Tech]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

Please make sure you work with the CommitCRM users prior to implementing this so that you understand how we typically work with our customers. I would hate to have contracts enhanced and then still not be able to match up with how we do business.

[lpopejoy]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

Hmm... Maybe block of money contracts would work for projects. I'll explore that option. Thanks

[raymond]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

The problem with trying to substitute Contracts for Projects is that you no longer have Contracts to use for... tracking contracts!

In other words, what do you do with a client that already has a contract in place (say a Block of Time) and it needs to be used for the project (or part of the project)? Or how about a client that has multiple contracts in place and a project spans multiple contracts (this happens all the time)? Contracts work in place of projects ONLY when contracts are not being used to track contracts. Contracts are intended to track billing and rate variations due to types of billing, they are a very poor substitute for tracking projects, so why is that being suggested as the solution? Why has an FAQ been created to teach us how to pound in nails with a screwdriver?!?

Like lpopejoy, I feel that CommitCRM has stagnated and is not seeing the bigger picture. Tracking just billable time is simply too narrow a focus. CommitCRM has grown, and so has its client base (that would be us!). Putting technical feature requests aside, it seems CommitCRM isn't thinking about two critical points; workflow and business management. CommitCRM is no longer just a "time tracking tool", it's bigger than that, it's now part CRM and ERP, whether intentional or not!

Workflow is how projects and tasks are brought in, worked on, approved, organized, tracked and billed. Contracts works well enough and mostly do what they need to do (track billable time and variances in rates). The ticket feature works well enough. The task features are pretty much useless (but do underline that CommitCRM does see the need for a hierarchy, it just needs to be properly implemented). The missing link here are Projects.

Business Management is what all the folks who spend significant time on the forum are looking for... the ability to track the health of their business. Lpopejoy already expanded on this but his point seems to be missed. Data goes in, but there's no way to make sense of it. On a side, the statistics board is a good first try and I want to acknowledge that we have on occasion, used it to look at some metrics.

For a quick wrap-up, I would encourage CommitCRM to really take another look and review first hand how it's clients are using the program and more importantly, what we need it to do for our businesses. Projects are an important feature that need to be put into place but more importantly, understanding why and what this means is critical!

As always, thanks!

//ray

[AN-Tech]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

I think we need a CommitCRM User Group conference to discuss the direction CommitCRM is going as well as how we all do business. I would definitely travel to that one :-)

[lpopejoy]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

2nd that one. Just make it in the USA. :-)

[raymond]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!


Any chances we can get something like this rolling. We have quarterly webinars with most of our core vendors and find it critical to the vendor client relationship. Why can't we do this with Commit? It would be a good way to check in and have more direct communication and dialog -- which at this point, is starting to be a deal breaker for us... we really don't like it that we don't know "who" Commit is (beyond someone behind an email and forum) and/or have the ability to actually talk with someone.

//ray

[Support Team]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

We've evaluated this in the past and will reevaluate this option. Thank you for asking.

[natrat]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

+1 for suggestions relating to getting info back out to track the business itself.

I spent 30 mins the other day in reports trying to figure out how i could get a report that would give me a total of units of an item each staff member had sold in a period. CommitCRM seems to column hours/units for service items in the same thing but just ignores the units in the report. Ie. we have hourly rates but then fixed prices for things like standard workshop job. No matter what report I tried I ended u having to manually count the items for each employee to get a total. There may be a way to do it but my point is i couldn't find it easily.

And +1000000 for proper exchange sync. Having to run a client just to sync calendars really is years and years out of date, a waste of resources, and repeatedly asked about for the 5 or so years I've been here.

[Support Team]

Re: 6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

To get the Unit totals for Employees you can customize one of the Charges report e.g. Employee Charges Report or Employee Charges Summary Report and add at the bottom a DBCalc field of type SUM and then select Charges - Unit Quantity.