6-years and the 10K ticket mark!

So the day has come upon us. Last week, we reached the 10,000 ticket mark (which actually means 9,000 tickets because CommitCRM starts with 1,000 but just the same, another digit had been added to our ticket numbers)!

This also almost exactly marks out 6-year anniversary (6 years that we have been using CommitCRM). We initially started with the trial (v3.7.5.3) back in February of 2007 and moved into production July 1st of the same year. I have to say that for the most part, we have been very happy with CommitCRM, the people behind it and the community at large. In this time, we have grown and so has CommitCRM.

Through the years, I have made many comments, requests and suggestions as well as answered a few questions along the way. I think I can fairly say that we have been active with the community and understand the product pretty well. It is with this understanding, experience and history that I am tossing out a (short?) list of top-7 things that we feel are critical to getting CommitCRM (and by extension, us!) to the next level. And so, our top-7 list:

1) Projects:
At the very top of our list is having the ability to see and track everything that is happening at the project level. This is critical to our existence and we MUST find a way to do this moving forward. What we are talking about is the creation of a “master ticket” and a “sub-ticket” hierarchy (obviously the “master ticket” would be called a Project). Because we have so many projects with different employees working on different (but associated and linked) tickets, having the ability to see all the activity of the project, under one all-connected group is required. Basically, we need to be able to have a Project ticket that allows us to see (and filter accordingly) everything under the sub-tickets including; which employees are working on each ticket, due dates, status, status extensions, charges, etc. Please do NOT suggest that Tasks can do this function (I won’t elaborate here but the tasks feature, while a terrific idea, is very poorly implemented). We understand that this is not a trivial add-on and will require careful thought and attention to implement but having a “master” and “sub-ticket” hierarchy will, without a doubt, take the CommitCRM product to a new level.

2) Linking multiple assets to a ticket:
We initially had difficulty in deciding if this should be our #1 request but after a short while, projects became our clear choice. That is not to say this is not a critically missing function, to the contrary! One of the main problems with being able to properly document what is happening with an asset is the inability to link multiple assets to tickets. The problem here is that when a ticket is created for actions to more than one asset, it is impossible to bridge the ticket to each asset, which completely breaks the information linking chain. Until this gets fixed, CommitCRM will always be lacking in the ability to properly track work done to assets (this really is not an optional feature). This is a MUST HAVE feature.

3) More fields and multi-select boxes for contacts:
This one is a big deal for me personally. The fact that CommitCRM is called a CRM (Client Relationship Management) system means we should be able to track client information. This is impossible when we only have eighteen (18!) fields plus a notes field. To put this into perspective, Outlook literally has hundreds of fields. Eighteen fields is simply inadequate to properly track information on contacts. One example is that we are limited to two email addresses and two phone numbers. In addition, having the ability to add custom selection boxes (check box lists under special custom fields) similar to Outlook categories would be amazing! This would allow CommitCRM users to create lists for things like flagging contacts with specific rights (e.g. are they allowed to call into the helpdesk, can they ask to have user accounts added/deleted, are they authorized to access domain servers, etc.) or special contact procedures (are they a primary technical contact and should be called for major outages, do we send them monthly marketing materials, are the on our company holiday card list, etc.). Bottom line is that 18 fields and the lack of check box lists is killing us in the client relations area.

4) Fix the accounting module:
I have elaborated on this numerous times and find it somewhat amazing that this simple but obvious accounting module bug has still not been fixed. In short, markup and discounts MUST calculate on quantity (per piece) instead of totals because calculating off of the total introduces rounding errors (seriously!). Also, all CommitCRM users need the ability to enter negative quantities and have the system properly reverse things out (including markup/discounts, etc.) so that product can be returned to “inventory” -- this is not possible with the current accounting engine. Here are a couple of the referenced discussions on the topics: here, here, here, here, here,
here

5) Better Exchange integration:
There needs to be a server module that connects directly to the exchange server and keeps information in sync. This needs to run as a service so that we can remove the role from the client level.

6) Adding another level of Management (users):
We are now at the level where we have techs, lead techs and account managers. It would be a huge benefit if we could assign not only an Account Manager but a Lead Tech to an Account and then Tickets respectively. This would allow CommitCRM users to have Account Managers monitor and maintain client relationships better while allowing the Lead Techs to process tickets.

7) Custom Contracts:
It’s been asked by many but nothing has changed here. For example, being able to have all contracts (including the system default) mark new charges not-billable is needed.

OK, this posting has a lot of information and feedback that really needs to be digested to be understood. Nothing here is new though and a quick search in the forum will find many different discussions with many different people talking about each issue. We understand that there are hundreds (thousands?) of requests and please realize that we are not here to bashCommitCRM. To the contrary, as said earlier, CommitCRM has done a terrific job so far and does seem to listen to the community however, there are some foundation features and functions that MUST get addressed.

As always, I am open for discussion on any of these (and other) topics. Just let us know how we can assist. Thanks!!!

//ray

Thank you Ray for your feedback and for taking the time to compile and arrange this list. We have had the pleasure servicing you all of these years and are ready for the next six! We see ourselves lucky to have customers and users like yourselves that contribute and help us get better.

Many of the items you mentioned have already been discussed in other forum threads (or by email) so we prefer not to repeat what has been said already. We agree with many of your points and have a bit different implementation thoughts on others. Like always, and as per the many suggestions that have already been included in the product, we will seriously consider and evaluate everything. Thank you.

+10000 to what Ray suggested

Projects and exchange integration would be awesome.

I agree with much of what Raymond posted.

We need a lot more control and options with custom contracts. We have made them work for us but it can be a little clunky!

Our clients purchase monthly service hours, anything they do not use rolls over to the next month. It would be great to have CommitCRM assist with that roll over process! I realize this may be more complicated that I may think but I would sure help us out! 

A suggestion to Raymond in regards to his (1) Projects comment: We use a custom contract to manage our projects. We realized quickly that Tasks could never offer the kind of management on a project the way a “project contract” has for us. What we do is we create a contract for our clients’ regular monthly service hours (named and coded as Service Hours) and then create a separate contract for any "special projects" (named and coded Project). The contract allows us to track the time spent on that project alone. The project contract acts as a "master ticket" in which we can monitor all the tickets associated with the project…essentially, the tickets under the contract become your task list for the project. Under the Project Contract we can also see all charges, appointments, history and use the contract’s notes section the master/project notes rather than having to view them under the individual tickets' notes sections. Using a contract for our projects also gives us a more accurate analysis of how quickly tickets are being completed (open start to finish), as the project is a contract, not a ticket.

For us, the down side to this method, is that at the end of each month our billing department has to review those charges and then deduct the total project time from the client's service hour contract by entering a "project hours" charge against it. However, if our clients do not want to use their prepaid hours and choose to pay for the project separately, it is very convenient because it is already separated and ready to bill as the Project.

We certainly spent a lot of time mastering the Contract code and naming system for this but it was worth it. Now that we have the system in place it works for us but would be nice to have a few features added to smooth out the process.

Moving on to a couple comments/feature requests for Commit's Quotes, it would be great to have the option to link a quote to an appointment.

Secondly, we love that we can convert a quote to a ticket/contract however, it would be nice to have control over whether or not the charges are created. In our case we end up deleting the charges that CommitCRM converts over. It's just wasted time for us. However, we may get to a point where we will use that feature so it would be nice to be able to choose whether or not to create charges when converting to a ticket/contract.....or possibly have the option to move the charges as Notes would be AWESOME! We end up adding all this manually.

Lastly (for now), how great would it be to have the option to create both the ticket and contract in one process. There have been plenty of Project tickets that do not get linked to our project contracts because it is an extra step for us.

In case it isn't clear, we love CommitCRM and their support staff. We feel you guys are always working to improve based on our comments here and we appreciate it! We plan to continue investing in CommitCRM knowing our feedback is valued.

Thanks again, Commit!

Thank you hugicr for your great feedback and kind words. Suggestions noted.

bet me by 900 tickets :P

I would like to expand on the above comments a bit. We all like the CommitCRM product, if we didn't, we wouldn't be here trying to make it better. So, my comments are only in the spirit of "constructive criticism."

I feel sometimes that CommitCRM as a product has stagnated a bit - or maybe lost focus - on what it means to be a PSA. Your clients are business owners - chiefly, technicians secondly. The product needs a paradigm shift We need a tool that gives us relevant data, fast:
1) Are my employees working hard enough?
2) What contracts are losing money?
3) Are tickets stagnating (Queue based SLA, yeah, I had to bring it up again... ;))?
4) Seriously, is there a ticket that needs attention?
5) MSP contracts anybody? I need a tool that lets me sell in *any* configuration I want to.
6) iOS app - no one is at their desks - web interface is too slow.
7) Statistics... Dashboard...
8) Reporting engine that lets me build powerful reports
9) Metrics - how am I doing this month as compared to last month.

I feel like CommitCRM does a good job of getting data into the system, but after that... It seems like it is "stuck." I've spent way too many hours using ODBC, PHP, IIS, etc hacking dashboards, and reports - just to answer my own questions about my business. If CommitCRM could start looking at their product as a tool for business owners, rather than a tool for technicians - I think it would be life changing for the product.

After nearly 20,000 tickets, I feel like I know CommitCRM as a product and a company pretty well - and I've done my share of looking. I'm very happy with what you guys are doing, but, like Ray, I suppose - I hope that we could convince the leadership to take a step back and take a more aggressive look at making CommitCRM better.

I completely agree with lpopejoy, especially in regards to items 1-5. These items are critical for running our businesses properly.

Notes received. Thanks. We're not sure whether you use it or not, and it is not a replacement for everything, but - please review the Statistic Board feautre. It provides powerful insights.

Thanks.

Statistics Board? Don't get me started... Your statistics board is one of the biggest indicators that you may need to re-focus to product to a business owner. If your statistics board is what you think a business owner wants to see... then let's have lunch someday. I'll take you around and introduce you to some business owners and see how many of them really get excited by the "Statistics Board featre." ...enough said. You already got me started.

We do not see the Statistic Board as the solution. We hinted about it because 99% of our users have never seen it and it does provide value, even if it is different than the requirements you listed above.

Ok, just making sure. Delete my post if you want.

Commit, can you tell us if item #1 on Ray's list has any traction at all? I'm getting to the point where this is more and more needed. Thanks!

We have received a few other requests for this, however at this time it is not one of the most popular requests. We suspect that the reason for this is that most users use Contacts to implement Projects. You get most of the functionality Ray mentioned - it wraps all related tickets under one roof, you see due dates, assignments, etc. You can also budget the Project by using a Block of Money type of Contact for the Project. Yes, we know it is not the exactly what Ray refers to, however for many users it works great. A short overview about it can be found here.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 :-)

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

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

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

+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.

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.