ERPNext

Running a business means handling invoices, tracking stock, managing personnel and a long tail of daily operations, and the market usually sells a separate product for each task. ERPNext does all of it in one system and gives it away, which removes both the license bill and the integration work between half a dozen tools.

The system is built on Frappe Framework, a full-stack web framework written in Python and JavaScript that supplies the database abstraction layer, user authentication and a REST API. The interface uses Frappe UI, a Vue-based component library for single-page applications built on top of that framework.

Five areas make up the core of what ERPNext manages.

• Accounting: recording transactions through to summarizing and analyzing financial reports.
• Order management: inventory levels, stock replenishment, sales orders, customers, suppliers, shipments and fulfillment.
• Manufacturing: the production cycle, material consumption, capacity planning and subcontracting.
• Asset management: every asset from purchase to disposal, covering IT infrastructure and equipment across the organization.
• Projects: internal and external delivery tracked by task, timesheet and issue against budget and profitability.

Self-hosting runs through Docker, and a compose file raises an evaluation site in a couple of minutes, though the maintainers mark that environment as disposable and unfit for production. A bench install script handles a manual deployment with its dependencies including MariaDB, and Frappe Cloud offers managed hosting for teams that would rather not operate the stack.