Removal of Duration Field?

TimB

Hi Everyone,

I received an email from Pipedrive yesterday informing me that the "Duration" field from the Products table will be removed June 9th, and to be completely blunt, this will render Pipedrive useless to us.

We're a staffing company where our product is different categories of Staff at different tiers, which our clients order at specific times, and each category/tier/hub has a bill rate that needs to not only be represented on an invoice but also to our ops team who manages the scheduling.

Clients order variable numbers of staff at variable scheduled times, and many orders have several different price categories of staffing services. The duration field worked just fine. Clients can see how many people they've ordered, and how many hours those people are working and the bill rate for those hours. In the notes field we put the scheduled shift times, which isn't ideal but it works.

With the removal of hours, Pipedrive support has suggested 3 work arounds

1- Bill clients with units of time not people. e.g. 5 staff x 5 hours = 25 units of time. We would have to represent the number of staff in the notes field and do the manual calc for units in each shift. It would make the sales process excruciating to have to do that, and be very confusing for clients where the standard is to see what they order.

2- Add a "duration" custom field to the Deals/Leads category. Major issue here is that we have many different durations on each product, so we'd have to have "Product 1 Duration", "Product 2 duration" ""Product 3 duration" etc. we'd need probs at least 50 and I'm not even sure how we would adjust the billing so that we could calc that.

3- Label each product with the duration in the title e.g. "Hub - Tier of Staff - Category of Staffing service - Duration". We would need to create at least 3000 products to encompass that added variable as call times start at 15 minute intervals. It would also be super laborious and confusing to change the product every time a client updated the call times.

So with these responses and understanding that they're not a good fit, Pipedrive support suggested I come here and post on the community board for visibility.

I really need either a) for duration to not be removed, or b) for a viable solution to this problem.

Thanks for any support,

Paul Minors

@Mike van der Valk do you know which product manager is the best person to talk to about this. Tim (above) is a client of mine and the new subscriptions feature doesn't appear to be a viable replacement and we don't want the Durations feature to be taken away. Who would be the best person to talk to about this?

Bernd Auer

@Paul Minors , I'll send you the contact details via Slack. But @TimB , from the distance I can not see why the new feature can not cover your needs. But you are in best hands with Paul I am sure, you will find a suitable solution.

What worries me more at the moment it that the recurring products in one deal are limited to 10 at the moment. So in your case you could just add 10 different category/tier/hub in one deal. I already told the guys that this has to be more.

TimB

Hi @Bernd Auer , thanks for your comment.

It's very possible I'm not seeing the full extent of the new feature. Can you tell me how I would input this example order in to the product section of a deal?

Our (example) Client wants

5 Waitstaff from 4pm to 10pm - billed at $30 per hour

5 Bartenders from 3:30pm to 11pm - billed at $32 per hour

2 Back of House Support Staff from 4pm - 12am - billed at $27 per hour

Thanks!

Paul Minors

The reason this new feature doesn't quite cut it is in @TimB 's example, we want to have multiple products for the waitstaff, bartenders and back of house staff etc. Then show the quantities of staff (e.g. 5, 5 and 2) and then the duration of hours (6, 7.5 and 8). The removal of the duration feature really sucks for Tim.

Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Hi everyone,

Currently, the best workaround available for hourly/daily rates is to use the quantity product field and multiply the current duration and the quantity for the final result, and have the results pre-computed so that the deal value is the same as before.

@Bernd Auer - We will be expanding the number of recurring products that could be added to a given deal as the current limit per deal can be limiting for some use cases. We solved some technical limitations to increase it. We are developing reporting capabilities on top of the current recurring product functionality and an upper limit is necessary to allow us to build the best forecasting possible within the Insights feature 🙏

TimB

Hi @Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Same question as I asked earlier, can you show me how that would be using the example in this earlier thread?

Our (example) Client wants

5 Waitstaff from 4pm to 10pm - billed at $30 per hour

5 Bartenders from 3:30pm to 11pm - billed at $32 per hour

2 Back of House Support Staff from 4pm - 12am - billed at $27 per hour

Thanks!

TimB

Hey @Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Following up, what would be the best way in the new system to represent this example client order to our clients?

Thanks!