How to make a common Customer & Supplier?

ERPNext
21

Hello;
Any update on this feature?
Regards
Bilal

22

Any update on this matter? Being able to register one company as supplier and customer at the same time is a common practice in many ERP systems. Because you need to gather all credit and debit invoices in one report to make a total balance.

1 Like
23

What is the status on this

24

Yes, an update would be great! I think this is really an interesting feature if you can crack this!

1 Like
25

I would like to know that, is that work now or not?
Other software, they called Business Partner and Business Partner can be Supplier or Customer or Both?
Hope to get this feature very soon.

26

So, going through as much history of this feature request, as humanly possible in a very short period of time, this feature has been languishing almost 8 years, despite having a bounty [Feature] Customer and Supplier as one Party [Bounty] ¡ Issue #7538 ¡ frappe/erpnext ¡ GitHub, and many other attempts to workaround or circumvent a very common place business requirement.

To the Frappe/ERPNext team, despite your generous community efforts and excellent coding chops, you are losing business due to the developer mindset. In real life and in business domains, having a “Party” serve as a customer and as a supplier is a very common place scenario. Not only that, many of the prominent accounting softwares and ERP platforms recognise and completely support this scenario. This is further more important, as account reconcilliation also factors both sales and purchases
from the same party, irrespective whether a customer or a supplier.

I hate to compare, but I once was an avid fan of odoo, which integrated this concept very well in the workflows (I recollect odoo calling it “Partner”, and a Partner can be both Customer and/or Supplier). It was only when odoo started getting greedy that I was pushed to search for other options, which is when (around 2014-15) I gave ERPNext a try.

I know it must be quite a task to refactor existing database schema and workflows to integrate this concept, but idling on a business mandated requirement for close to 8 years, is not just ridiculous but also bad business planning on ERPNext’s part, that too despite having paid development bounty.

I’m reminded of this video above, where @rmehta made a very controversial remark “Do We Need Managers?”, which in my personal humble opinion was - putting it politely - “business-immature”, especially coming from MD of Frappe, which offers paid subscriptions for “Enterprise Planning” for business. The above feature and the delay and lack of focus is exactly why managers are required …

I earnestly pray and request to @rmehta to take notice of such glaring roadblocks for new and existing users of such a great offering.

2 Likes
27

I believe that

solves the problem to quite an extent.

28

Dear @shubhamgupta123,

I hope you have personally used and tested the custom app (Double Ledger Parties), before suggesting it to others. The custom app merely links 2 separate DocType entities in the DB, to cross reference transactions (specifically sales invoice and purchase invoices). That’s very limited in the expected scope of transactions, and its just a very superficial workaroud the main pain point.

1 Like
29

Hi @rohitbanerjee,

It seems I missed your comment earlier. I did personally install and used the custom app I mentioned for a few use cases. While I understand that the said app be limited in terms of the expected scope, it could be good enough for a lot of people. It is a app made by someone in the community and I just shared it in this thread so that someone in the community could benefit.

About the feature not yet being implemented in ERPNext, I completely understand why as I’ve been following the product for many years. The issue/bounty link you referred never sees any concrete layout of the exact requirement. @me2ne did chip in with a flow chart but that is definitely not enough.

Personally, I don’t think the use-case of merging Suppliers and Customers in a single field Party (or anything else) is something generic enough to be incorporated inside core ERPNext. Also, only if someone can chalk up how it could be incorporated without making breaking changes system-wide for all the other dependencies, do I believe it is advisable for the team to start thinking on it.

Again, I speak only for myself and in no way represent anyone from the Frappe core team.

30

Thanks for the custom app information. We are facing an issue of supplier and customer being one party. Hope this will help.

31

What’s the purpose of dividing contractors into suppliers and customers? Maybe it’s just some kind of legacy decision and this can be remedied with new entity called for example contractor with some kind of migration mechanism from legacy customer and supplier?

32

Any update about this feature? IT’s a long time but nothing happen

1 Like
33

Its close to 11 years anniversary of this request, and I doubt any movement in this direction. I am willing to fork a separate instance of ERPNext, for implementing the “Party/Partner” concept, but due to my own limited time and bandwidth, I am looking for others to contribute as well, in code or cash.

34

Common Party Accounting is already available in erpnext

https://docs.erpnext.com/docs/v14/user/manual/en/accounts/articles/common_party_accounting

35

That’s great news, but I my reserve my comments till I see the code “under-the-hood”. I have a strong suspicion it may be “foreign-keying” two separate data objects (DocType) superficially, rather than building on the concept grounds-up.

EDIT:
This feature is not in master release yet.
https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/search?q=Common+Party+Accounting
https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/search?q=enable_common_party_accounting

36

Common party Accounting is long awaited.