How to view all related communication with a contact, lead, customer or supplier

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I’ve been doing some testing with ERPNext for some time now and reading along and posting on the forum for little over a year now.

Time has come to decide if I’m going to implement ERPNext for my day to day operation, be it the cloud version or self-hosted. As I’m a one-man business we could argue if an ERP solution is not overdoing it, and maybe it is. But before starting my own company I have been working for company’s who were working with Outlook, Word, Excel etc. Although you’ll be fine in de beginning but when time passes you seems to lose control. One of the most frustrating things I was confronted with on regular basis was that it was very hard to get a good overview of all the communication (emails, calls visits, notes, etc.) there was with a client over the years. This should be easy to deal with in CRM system.

Unfortunately, I found so far that ERPNext is at least lacking some futures when it comes to communication and especially when considering communication by email. I asked several questions on the forum and raised some GitHub issues of email related behavior of what I think are probably bugs. Unfortunately, I don’t get any real answers, which surprises me as from my point of view, email is the nr1 communication media these days. But somehow there seems not much interest in it. So I still wonder how users of ERPNext work with email communication on a day to day basis.

So far for the long introduction, my question is:

I would like to be able to get an overview of all the communication (email, phone, visit, internal note) there has been with a certain contact. Where ever I wright contact you could also read; lead, customer or supplier. At this moment you have to go to the contacts page and there you can find the communication that has been created directly from the contacts page. Communication that has been created from a related document (Q, SO, INV, etc.) is not listed underneath the contact.

I added custom fields to the Communication doctype, beeing x_contact, x_lead, x_customer, and x_supplier. By linking these fields to the related contact or lead, customer, supplier. I can see all related communication with a contact by selecting his record in the list filter of the communication module. This works ok but the problem is that I have to set these custom fields manual and that is not a practical solution.
Can these fields be automatically set by a custom field?

So let’s say I add a comment to a SINV, it will create a new communication document. could a custom script execute on the creation of the document fetch the contact and custommer the SINV is linked to and set these to the custom fields?

Or am I thinking in a completely wrong direction and is there another possibility to achieve an overview of the communication?

2 Likes
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Great feature requests. You are not asking to much. Just that it is community developed software and if you see something is needed or required, you have to identify, hire a developer, implement and put it back into open source community. :slight_smile: necessity is the mother of all inventions. Just that you must want badly enough to throw some money behind it :slight_smile:

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It’s not like I’m asking for a feature It’s more like I’m pretty sure something is not working like intended so I would qualify it as a bug. I, therefore, asked for a confirmation that it’s a bug on the forum and posted issues on GitHub. Unfortunately without any response that makes clear if it’s a bug or that I’m doing something wrong in the setup.

I would say communication with your customers and suppliers is on the most important aspects of a business and unless the rest of the ERPNext users are using pigeons to do so I would think one or two might use emails to communicate and could, therefore, tell me how they integrate emails in their ERPNext workflow.

The question of this thread was if I Could get an overview of all communication the way I subscribed it with a custom script or that it would require more programming.

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There is a module called “Support”. I have never used it per se. But here you can create an “issue” for all communication regarding your customer / purchase. Also the “Communication” link has a list of all sent emails. But not inbox. Not sure if this really would satisfy your requirements. I don’t use CRM heavily, except for tracking leads and making quotations.

Let us know what you discover! (or don’t) :slight_smile:

Best!

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The Support module allows you to record issue’s you have with your customers. For example, a customer has bought a product from you and is not happy with it, you can record this as an issue and until you find a solution for the problem the issue stays open.

The communication link in your screenshot is just another link to the general communication doctype.
So the support module doesn’t add anything regarding tracking all communication with a contact, lead, customer or supplier.

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How would ERPNext know who you are calling?

Maybe, you should make an “Issue” in the Support module of everything you say and do with the customer/contact/…whatever…whoever. And there you start tracking it. That would be a way to do it.

Another way is every email, note, visit, whatever record you create, create a corresponding “issue” (using REST API) and then you have it tracked in one place. (keep pushing a copy). For that you will again need to define & have it developed.

As a side note : Unified communications as has been envisioned (SMS, emails, Phones) since 2000 has never taken off in the way it meant to. Now what we see is collaboration (Trello, Slack, Zendesk…) all vying for a being the “central hub”. Depending on your comfort, you can use Zapier (https://www.Zapier.com) to consolidate into one place, without writing code.