[Vtigercrm-developers] Selling Subscription Services

[Alan Lord (News)]

Hi all,

I'm having a bit of a hard time getting my head around the way the 
selling of Services/Service Contracts are supposed to work in vtiger.

A scenario:

Our customer creates a new Sales Order. It has two service items on it:

* A Subscription to access their website for a year.
* Some advertising space on their website for 6 months.

On that Sales order where do I record the periods that the two services 
are valid from-to?

I see that once the Sales Order is saved you can add a "Service 
Contract" to each service item (this just seems like duplicating effort 
to me) but once that is done there is no obvious way to see which 
Service Contract is related to what Line Item or even Sales Order!

I want to be able to set up some workflows that will alert the sales 
team when subscriptions are getting close to their end but this way I 
can't see how it would work.

The alternative, I guess, is to create a separate Sales Order for each 
service and use a couple of custom fields for start & end dates, but 
this seems definitely sub-optimal to me.

Am I being stupid?

Thanks

Al

-- 
Libertus Solutions
http://www.libertus.co.uk