We need to have a way to associate Communications and To-Dos created via the API with the Deals they belong to - like we can already do with Contacts (http://developer.batchblue.com/related_contacts.html).

We've had excellent success setting up service-oriented customers on BatchBook, using Deals to track each sale from the first contact through to a finished project. A major part of this setup includes creating custom, role-based interfaces to BatchBook - e.g. a phone intake form for secretaries that creates a Contact, Deal and various To-Dos, assigning all of them to the correct salesperson).

The problem we're now facing is two-fold. First, the 'salespeople' at our customer companies are generally 'in-the-field' people. They don't sit at a desk all day, navigating the CRM with aplomb - they need quick and simple ways to log their Deal-related activities, often from the road. Second, we've created nice, simple forms that allow the sales team to record activities and create To-Dos (with standard subjects, types and tags), but it's currently not possible to associate these newly-created entities with the Deals they belong to (except for manually, inside BatchBook for Communications, only).

This makes things difficult because it's practically impossible to look at a Deal and know what activities have been performed on it. Has the salesperson delivered a bid? How many times has he tried to follow up on the bid? What, if any, conversations have taken place along the way? Because a sales person may have to talk to multiple Contacts regarding a single Deal, there's almost no way to get a unified view of what the sales person has done in relation to the Deal.

I know you're working on BatchBook 2.0, but this functionality is extremely important - with a custom form, we can let a sales person easily indicate that he called a customer regarding a Deal but got no answer, automatically schedule a follow-up To-Do to call the customer on the following day, and even increment a "Number of Contact Attempts" field in a Super Tag on the Deal. This can all be done in one quick form, rather than forcing the sales person to log in to BatchBook and navigate to various different screens, then have to remember which Subject, Communication Type and Tag(s) he needs to add.

Right now it's either one or the other - force the sales people to go into BatchBook and perform a number of steps, while out on the road in order to get a unified view of Deal-related activities, or give them a quick form interface for capturing activities, but have no way to associate those activities with the Deals they belong to.

Would love it if we could get something in this area - we're working on what will hopefully be a reusable foundation for making BatchBook the go-to CRM for service-oriented businesses whose employees may be overwhelmed by the full interface.

Kurt