Structuring best practices

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1

Hi Gliders,

I need your help to build a solution. I listed different structures below so you can get an idea of the problem.

I’m currently running my entire HVAC business on Glide; CRM, contracts, invoices, products, inventory, calendar events, etc. All internal use for me, my employees and sub-contractors for now.

I’ve been thinking of offering service plans for my customers but I’m facing a couple of issues regarding different structures;

  1. Internal

First way I thought was to offer the service plans like we do with current contracts and products: create a contract, send it for e-signature and then send the technician whenever the customer wants to have his service(s) done.

Issues:

  • An employee has to manually add the service plan and input credit card infos wish involves a security concern. It also means that I need to build a payment integration with stripe and/or payhere.

  • The customer cannot purchase and/or cancel his plan by himself and requires the help of an employee each time wish costs labor time that could be used in lots of better ways.

  1. Customer portal

Creating a customer facing app that would be linked from my company’s website. Customers could log in and manage their service plans subscriptions themselves.

Issues:

  • I would need to use the “Contacts” table used in our main company app as a users table in this app and make it a public app with sign in. This would make all rows unsecured since we don’t use row owners on this table in our current main app because it’s only used by employees internally and they need to access all customers at any time.

  • We have around 6-7k rows in this table so this is more then Glide’s 1k public users limit.

  1. External + internal

Using my company’s Squarespace website and their subscription features we could sell service plans without having to build a payment structure. Customers could create an account and purchase/cancel their plans by themselves without having us collect any payment data.

Issues:

  • Linking the service plan to the correct contact, contract and/or product/item in our glide app would need an api or make integration. From what I saw, the Squarespace make integration allows to create and update products and orders but doesn’t allow to delete them. This would require a complicated deeper integration with stripe and linking different IDs together between Stripe, Squarespace and Glide. This is something I want to avoid as much as possible.

  • Crafting service plans products and creating contracts for those plans in Squarespace is limited and not an optimal solution for an HVAC business like us.

These solutions all come with headaches and seem hardly scalable. If you know any other way that would be simpler I would really like to know about them.

Thanks in advance!

2

Make everything in google sheets, and have google scripts do all integrations… then fetch all into the Glide.

3

I think it just means you have to build a payment integration with Stripe/PayHere, because in no case should your app require them to input their credit card info.

If you do the integration above, you can let them manage their subscription using Stripe/PayHere’s portal.

Have you tried talking to Sales to see if Enterprise can get you to that number? Would all of those users sign in every month?

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