ERP Suite Overview

The ERP layer adds the machinery a business system needs once it stops being a database with forms on it: a ledger that is the system of record, stock that cannot drift, documents with a lifecycle, projects that bill, and the arithmetic underneath all of it.

It works against your datastores, not instead of them

This is the single most important thing to understand, and it is unusual. The ERP engines do not ship their own customer table, their own product table or their own invoice table. They work against the datastores you designed, with your column names, through a mapping called a binding.

So the stock engine does not need a table called Products. It needs to be told which of your datastores plays the item role, and which column on it holds the code. You keep the data model you built for your business; the engines supply the behaviour.

What is included

• Calculated fields and rollups — server-side arithmetic for line totals and header totals.
• Transactional documents — document types with an enforced lifecycle, and conversion from quote to order to despatch to invoice.
• General ledger — double-entry journals, multi-currency, period close.
• Accounting and bank feeds — inbound data from Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and bank connections.
• Stock — an append-only movement ledger with reservations and FIFO valuation.
• Structures — bills of materials, recipes, kits, routings and requirements planning.
• Pricing — price lists with quantity breaks, discount rules and commissions.
• Time, expenses and projects — capture, rate cards, budgets and billing plans.
• Assets — a register with meters, preventive maintenance and posted depreciation.
• EDI — trading partners, message mapping and transports including AS2 and OFTP2.
• Analytics — a measure and dimension model over any registered datastore.

Adopt only what you need

The modules are separate. A professional services business might use time, projects, documents and the ledger and never touch stock or EDI. A distributor might use stock, pricing, documents and EDI and have no projects at all. Nothing obliges you to enable a module you have no use for, and an unused module costs you nothing.

Where to start

Two concepts come before everything else: entities and bindings. Entities are the legal companies your data is filed under. Bindings are how the engines find your tables. Read those two articles next — every other module assumes them.