Opportunity Series

[#1]

The current Opportunities functionality works well for "one-off" sales, but for many companies business is not like that. I have a number of clients who sell products or services on a call-off or monthly service basis. For these people there is one sale but the revenue income needs to be divided over a number of weeks or months.

I would like the ability to create an automated "Opportunity Series" where I can easily turn a single opportunity into a series of monthly opportunities spread over a period of time.

So, for example, I get an order to supply 12 Widgets (that's one order)  for £12,000 which are shipped and invoiced at a rate of one a month over a 12 month period. I therefore turn the opportunity into an Opportunity Series of 12 Opportunities, scheduled each month for the next 12 months, each with a Total value of £1,000.

I want to be able to enter the product information, the contract start date and the number of months the contract will run for, and have ACT! calculate the monthly revenue and create as many opportunities as required. All from one screen.

...and, as part of the process I would like a reminder scheduled two months from the end of the contract to get in touch with the client to renew the contract.

Jeff

[#2]

I agree this would be beneficial especially if you could apply ship/close dates for each month and easily edit the quantities for each month. We could have an annual blanket order for a customer for 1000 units at 100 per month. The customer might skip a month or two but later move up the delivery for one month or push it back.

[#3]

I've been waiting for something like this from ACT for as long as I've had the system around. For my business, phasing of a job is crucial.  I work in a technical/creative services industry where an individual contract can be worth anything from £1K to £250K and take anything from a day to six months to deliver.

At the moment I have to use one system for scheduling and billing, another (excel) for managing my pipeline and a third (ACT) as my CRM.  Whilst I'd love to use ACT's opportunity module, I can't, because it would mean I have no track of phasing.  This is crucial for forecasting.  Just can't understand why Sage haven't implemented something like this...

Any ideas?

[#4]

I think it would be great to have a recurring opportunity function too.  My clients have annual contracts that I need to collect.  The opportunity every year is the same.  But, I have to key in the same opportunity over and over, every year.  It seems like they could program the software to ask if this is a recurring opportunity and at what frequency.