Hi! We have to build a database for users/members and different organizations of a network. That database will be the core of a big non profit project that is very important to us. At first we were thinking on designing the database and developing its interfaces from scratch, but we are now considering using a CRM. It has to be open source (we are considering suiteCRM, CiviCRM, Odoo, ERPNext/FrappeCRM, EspoCRM, Krayin/LaravelCRM, and Dolibarr, but we have yet to study them).

The thing is that we would then use the database of the CRM to hold the members/clients of the network, so we would need a very flexible database, and it being easily connectable via API to different other web services. I know this should be feasible, but would you recommend doing something like that?

The other way would be to make our own database and connect it via API with a CRM so the CRM database stays in sync with our core client/member database.

For you guys experienced in this CRM lands... does any of the proposals sound more practical than the other? or a third idea?

thanks!

Hello,

Can you share your platform and the annual costs and set up.

Having a nightmare with salesmen ATM hounding me for 45 mins calls just to get a rough idea of costs.

Thanks

I've spent quite a few years working with CRM and business software, and one thing keeps bothering me.

The software itself is often not even the expensive part.

It's everything around it.

Consultants. Implementation projects. Workshops. Custom configuration. Data migration. Training. Then months later you're still adapting your company to the software you bought.

I always wanted something much simpler:

sign up, bring the data you already have, answer a few questions about how your company works, review what the system proposes, and start.

No consultancy just to get started.
No custom code for every company.
No €50k implementation before you know whether the product even helps you.

And I also don't really want 15 separate SaaS tools anymore.

My ideal model is one platform with a small number of apps, like Sales, Support and Operations, sharing the same customers, work, automation and context underneath.

AI should mostly remove setup and admin friction. Not be another chatbot bolted onto the side.

So I've been building around a few principles:

• onboarding should take minutes, not weeks
• importing existing data should be normal
• software should adapt to the company
• configuration should replace customer-specific code
• you should be able to start small and add more later
• AI should prepare and configure work, while people stay in control

I'm not really looking for feedback on a feature list. More interested in whether this underlying idea matches how other people experience business software.

If you could replace your CRM / business software tomorrow, what would stop you?

The price?
Migration?
Implementation effort?
Losing your current processes?
Getting the team to adopt another system?

Curious which one is actually the biggest blocker.

I own a contractor business, and I have been with Jobber for approximately 2 years now. I noticed that for the last few months, I was being overcharged because they upgraded me to a plan I never asked for, and when I contacted them, threatening that I would file a chargeback, they deactivated my account and will not allow me to access my customer information. I am honestly sick of these guys. I keep trying to reach them, they say someone will get back to me and no one does, I read other reviews, and this doesn't seem as uncommon as I thought. They do a bunch of other scams. You'd think that because they're big in this field, you can trust them, but it seems to be the opposite.

At this point, I accepted that all my data would be lost, and I just want to migrate to something else that's reliable. Any recommendations you guys have will be appreciated. A couple of options I'm seeing on reddit is housecallpro, clientility and joist. I'm conflicted and don't want to find myself in a mess like this again. It has been stressful and disappointing dealing with this after being a loyal customer for 2 years.

I’m researching how this works in real companies, specifically teams using HubSpot + QuickBooks.

I’ve heard a few examples of the two systems agreeing initially, then getting out of sync later after things like partial payments, refunds, reversals, credit memos, or an invoice being changed.

But I don’t want to assume that’s common based on a handful of cases.

If you’ve actually dealt with this at your company, what happened the last time the two systems disagreed?

How did someone notice?

Who ended up fixing it, sales, finance, RevOps, an outside consultant, someone else?

And what did fixing it actually involve?

Especially interested in firsthand examples rather than what the integration is supposed to do.

Nowadays, whenever I open Reddit, everyone is building something. A CRM that can do anything.
Unified inbox
commitment tracking
stakeholder mapping
deal health and score
sentiment analysis

My question is: do sales reps need these kinds of tools, or are they happy to fill them out and do their work individually on Excel sheets without the help of any crm

I’m working on a SaaS product where our customers receive leads from multiple lead-capture platforms. Some of these platforms, including Google Pay-Per-Click and various home-service lead sources, send the lead details via email rather than through an API/webhook.
For example, a customer has:
[email protected]
and receives an email containing:
New Lead
Name: Dave Smith
Phone: xxx
Email: [email protected]
Address: xxx
Service: AC repair
What I want is for the SaaS product to automatically pick up those lead emails from the customer’s mailbox, extract the lead details, and create a lead in the CRM—without the customer having to manually copy the information from the email.
I’m curious how other CRMs handle this.
Has anyone built or seen a system like this? How do CRMs typically tackle leads coming into a customer’s Gmail/Outlook mailbox?
Do they connect directly to the mailbox, use forwarding addresses, email parsing services, or something else?
I’d especially love to hear about real-world implementations or examples of CRMs/products that already do this.
Any ideas or experiences would be appreciated.

I m an SDR at a mid size b2b saas company and our account list is getting ridiculous. There are hundreds of accounts in the crm and I can't tell if I'm spending time on the right ones.

Right now I mostly sort by company size, industry, and whether they opened an email before. It feels pretty weak though. Some accounts look like a great fit but never respond, while smaller ones sometimes have several people checking the site or looking at pricing.

Our team has started looking at buyer intent and technographic data, but I'm still not sure how much weight to give those signals. A single page visit doesn't seem like enough, but repeated activity from different people at the same company feels worth paying attention to. I guess the timing matters too, since old activity can make the account look hotter than it is.

How are people here ranking accounts each day? Do you have an account score or a set of signals that tells reps who to contact first? I'm trying to make the list less random and stop wasting good prospecting time, thanks in advance