Another reason to hate sales people!

Re: Another reason to hate sales people!

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I don't know the software well enough yet, but can't you create the customer
and then just credit the account for the value of three months. So when the
invoice is created it will be paid by the credit? Also can you put a
negative amount in the setup field so this creates a credit?

Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: isp-list@optigold.com [mailto:isp-list@optigold.com]On Behalf Of
Shawn Hogan
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 9:02 PM
To: Optigold ISP List
Subject: Re: [Optigold ISP] Another reason to hate sales people!

Michael J. Colvin wrote:

> Ok...Here's another reason I generally hate sales people...
>
> Our sales/marketing guy put out an ad pushing for a 3 year commitment
> (Contract) on monthly accounts. With the 3 year agreement, the user
> gets three months free. The kicker is, the three months are the first
> month of each year...
>
> Any ideas how the hell I'm supposed to set up a product for something
> like this?
>
> Why can't they (Sales people) just keep it simple? Every time I think
> I've figured out a way to do any billing cycle item they want, they come
> up with a new one...
>
> This is why I have a picture on the wall behind my desk. It's an old
> picture of a kid standing in front of an old style ranch house with a
> shotgun. The caption says: "Pop told me to shoot every third salesman.
> The second one just left."
>
> Anyway, anyone got any suggestions on setting up a product like this?

Hmmmm... not that I can think of (automatically at least). You run into all
sort of nastiness... A few things I can think of off the top of my head:

Maybe an existing customer that had a different service for a year, so you
don't want to base it on their establish date, because they might have had
other services prior to their contract.

You could (in theory) base it on the paid invoices, but then you get into a
painfully slow and complex query. Not only would you have to query items
that are related (and therefore not indexable), but you would be querying a
few relationships deep, querying line items, which are related to invoices,
and then the invoices are in turn related to the customers.

Also, how do you factor in if the customer was paying for that same service
before the contract, then decided to enter into the contract? Basing it
strictly on the invoices that they have paid for would not work either.

- Shawn

-------------------------------
Shawn D. Hogan
President, Digital Point Solutions
http://www.digitalpoint.com
(858) 452-3696

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