F-CRM
Customer Relations Management for Freelancers and Individual Contractors.
Screenshot from Debian Linux
Why?
I am a freelancer. I need professional relations with my clients. This require a system where all contact-information, documents, emails, calls, - everything - is easily available when I need it.
Backstory
I spent a full day trying to find a suitable solution. I looked for an open source, or at least affordable, desktop application. Nothing. Everything is cloud these days. It's just that - I don't want cloud. Cloud services are fragile. They may go tits up. They may get acquired and terminated. They may simply terminate your service for whatever or no reason. There is no cloud! It's just someone else's computer. I like dependable applications. They're faster to work with, have a richer set of UI controls, and they work whether Internet is available or not.
I did try odoo CRM and Sales modules, installing the backed on my own server. Odoo is very popular. It's an impressive project - but the CRM capabilities are too limited for my use.
So, I decided to code a good Desktop CRM application from scratch in one week. One week later, Friday 23'rd 2018, I downloaded the binary .deb package from my build server, installed it on my PC, and started to use it.
Features
The application is dead simple, with just the complexity and feature a high value Freelancer needs to do a brilliant job with sales and customer relations.
- Contact management (companies or private persons).
- Contact-person management at the companies.
- Intents (pipelines) - some mini-projects with clear defined goals that you want to achieve. For example , sell something to, or get the attention from, a prospect.
- Actions - Steps / tasks to perform to move an intent forward against completion. For example - send a follow-up mail at a specific date.
- Document management documents and mails are linked to customers, persons, intents or actions.
- Journal - a list of all the relevant things that has happened within the relation with a contact. This is updated automatically when you add or change information.
- Data is stored locally in a sqlite database.
- Integration with email clients so that we can send and look at sent/received emails directly from f-crm. Currently Thunderbird is tested.
Supported platforms
- Linux AppImage (built from Ubuntu Trusty LTS)
- Debian Stretch
- Debian Testing
- Ubuntu Xenial (LTS)
- Ubuntu Bionic (LTS)
- macOS
- Windows (Windows Vista and up, 64 bit builds)
Prebuilt binaries
When I release new versions, I provide binaries for the following platforms:
- Linux (AppImage)
- macOS (.dmg file)
- Windows (.msi file for Windows Installer)
How to build
I use QT Creator for this project. There are scripts for building and packaging it from the command-line.
There is also a Jenkinsfile and docker-files to build it on all platforms from Jenkins.
Current status
Under active development. I am using it myself, and will fix bugs and add nice features as other users suggest them or I discover them myself.