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Ask HN: How would you implement client, salesman, sales tracking system?

2 points by dmos62 ↗ HN
Will be helping a friend out by developing a business tracking system for his medical supplies company. The requirements seem very simple: the features that stand out are that salesmen shouldn't see others' clients and that the system would allow signing of pdfs by clients and storing those pdfs. We want to track clients, sales, salesmen, and when clients should be up for a resupply. Some notifications might be useful.

The obvious approach, for me, would be Postgres + some widely used web stack, everything custom. However, I feel like this use case is a very minor variation on a very general use case of tracking a sales-based business, and am wondering if there's any products, selfhostable or not, that I could customize instead. How would you approach this?

3 comments

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gregjor
I would use one of the many CRM systems already available, and adapt my business to it. Getting sidetracked with custom software development when that's not the core business and source of revenue is high risk and low payoff.
brudgers
I agree. The level of expertise required is relative to the client not to other programmers.

The difference is between thinking like a programmer and thinking like a consultant. A consultant provides what the client needs rather than trying to figure out how to apply their skill.

In this case, the OP's value add is coming up with a plan and implementing that plan. There's plenty of billable hours in customizing whatever package is chosen and a very high potential for a service contract.

dmos62
Thanks for the insights, useful. I came to the same conclusion regarding using some CRM platform. I'm a bit surprised I didn't think of that from the get go; might be because I was asked for a completely custom job initially. I've not yet decided on the approach, but currently I'm looking at Baserow[0] and Corteza[1]. I like Corteza's business model much more: allows it to be fully open-source, compared to Baserow's open-core.

[0] https://gitlab.com/baserow/baserow

[1] https://github.com/cortezaproject/