Project of the Month - September 2008

JustCRMs

Description of project

JustCRMs provides time entry against Cases and invoice creation against Accounts. It is suitable for organisations that use cases to manage the work they do for clients while needing a mechanism for recording the effort involved and creating invoices.

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

After 10 years designing and developing large scale administration systems for an Irish financial institution I set up my own company to provide IT services to small to medium enterprises.

I felt the time was right for smaller companies to take advantage of technologies that would give them control over their key processes and client communications. I felt by combining open source applications with hosting I could quickly provide valuable services to smaller enterprises who would not have their own IT department.

I chose SugarCRM because it was open source, continuously improving and had a great online community.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

I spent a little time reviewing and testing the JRabbit outlook plug-in but my main passion has been 'JustCRMs - Time and Invoicing'.

What inspired you to create this project?

My initial CRM client was an accounting company. I provided a tailored SugarCRM implementation with a focus on managing the compliance activities of their clients.

This required the development of an 'AutoCase' module which has a very flexible engine for defining when cases should be created automatically. For instance, they have an AutoCase set up which creates an Annual Return Case for all accounts with type 'Customer' one month before their Annual Return Date (a custom field against Account).

Time and billing is also a key part of their business so it was important to bridge this functional gap in order to provide a solution that would appeal to as many accounting companies as possible.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Every serious service company must track the time they spend working on jobs. If you use SugarCRM to manage work items (Cases) then you should be using SugarCRM to record time spent or you will have to double key Account and Case information into a separate system.

Is there anything that the users should know about? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

No, "JustCRMs - Time and Invoicing" does pretty much what it describes - you enter time and you bill it. Some people just enter time but "JustCRMs - Time and Optional Invoicing" didn't have the same ring to it.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

There are lots of really useful add-ons to be built that would be valuable to users and would never form part of the core product. I would like to see a mechanism for third-party modules similar to the Sugar Professional licensing mechanism that will disable these modules after a trial period has expired and a license has not been purchased through SugarExchange.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

I have a really cool 'AutoCase' module that I know loads of people will love and I have a half-built scanning interface so images of paper files can be indexed and uploaded to objects within Sugar.