Hey everyone,
I’m currently building a custom Frappe/ERPNext app tailored for SMB distributors and wholesale traders here in Egypt. It includes custom doctypes, hooks, tailored permissions, and a companion Flutter app for offline sales reps. I’ve got one live client using it right now, and I’m getting ready to onboard a few more. Before I go all in and scale this, I’d love some real-world advice from folks who’ve walked this path.
1. Long-term viability for a commercial SaaS
I’ve already built some pretty complex features—like a tree-structured Treasury doctype that auto-creates linked accounts and payment modes, plus customized buying/selling flows for batch tracking and cheque cycles. It all works great technically. But from an operational standpoint:
Are there any structural pitfalls I should watch out for as I add more clients on a shared multi-tenant setup (separate sites per client)?
Is there anything you wish someone had told you before building a vertical product on top of ERPNext instead of starting from scratch?
2. The Workspace/Sidebar UI headache (My biggest pain point)
Even after hiding completely unused modules (Manufacturing, Quality, etc.), the core workspaces like “Selling” still look overwhelming for non-technical users (shop owners, basic sales reps). There are just too many cards, reports, and links they will literally never click.
I’ve tried manually removing shortcuts in edit mode and heavily restricting roles, but it always feels like I’m fighting the framework. Is there a clean, standard pattern for giving these users a super minimal, curated view—just the 4-5 actions they actually need—without having to fix the standard workspaces after every version update? Do most of you just build fully custom pages/workspaces from scratch to avoid this recurring cleanup?
Any advice, workarounds, or battle stories from serving non-technical SMBs would be massively appreciated. I want to make sure the foundation is solid before I’m dealing with 10+ clients instead of just 1.
Thanks!