User versus Contact

[opalepatrick]

I may be getting my brain in a twist. I am just creating a first process module to handle quotations. These have pretty big old data capture forms for finance quotes that can require a lot of info about people inc. private individuals, company directors, shareholders. The transactions can be personal or business.

I have no use case at the moment that would require a contact to login and do anything (as it would all be entered manually) so my initial thought was just build a load of contacts with their details etc., they will all be in the admin area with users that have permission to edit create etc. The only thing that is bugging me is that I may be duplicating stuff that would be better handled by the users/roles setup built in to pw. Is there any sense in combining users and contacts with the possibility that some time in the future I may need contacts to login to maybe complete an application process for instance?

The reason I was shying away from using the user setup was the need to set passwords and usernames, etc.

The more I think about it, the more I think it might be better to tackle the future use as a separate application when I need it. (The one that came into my head might be for marketing follow-ups where people may want to unsubscribe, etc)

Any help unscrambling my brains would be appreciated. I just don't want to go down a rabbit hole.