[Vtigercrm-developers] Selling Subscription Services

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 20/03/12 22:45, Sreenivas Kanumuru wrote:
> Hi Alan,
>
>     On that Sales order where do I record the periods that the two
>     services are valid from-to?
>
>
> Start and end dates for a service could be captured in the Service
> Contract. But, currently there is no way to link a Service Contract to
> the Sales Order. This is a gap we should address in the product.

Thanks Sreenivas,

I'm not sure that adding another layer to the line item (a service 
contract) is the best way - it seems to be unnecessary and just extra 
mouse clicks to a user.

Personally, I think the "right" way would be to provide the admin user a 
way to be able to choose some number of custom fields (of whatever type) 
they have added to a product/service module to be displayed *in* the 
line item block of the Quote/SO/PO/Invoice etc... (I'm visualising this 
in the same way the description box is presented now.

I'd not used the services side much before and was rather surprised to 
see this. It seems like a major limitation of selling anything with a 
lifespan.

For completeness, I did get a reply "off-list" too...

> "
> Hi. Once we have a similar issue. We solved it adding two columns in inventory section of the Sales Order for the start and end of the service. (In our case the idea was to have 1 delivery date for each product in the SO)
>
> Then when the service order is save you can add a button to generate (create) the new contracts. Or you can do it automatically when the SO is save. Here you will need to call webservices to create those contracts.
>
> Is a big modification to vtiger core. Not The ideal solution.
> "

This is going to be quite an issue for us in the next couple of months. 
Any other suggestions/solutions would be welcome (or even the right 
approach to fix it; we'd be happy to contribute any code back to the 
project).

Cheers

Al

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