Implementation question related to inventory

Hi all,

Having gone back and forth on implementation (we purchased odoo and decided it was a nightmare), we’ve decided to go ahead with ERPNext but we want to stage the implementation and I would be grateful if anyone could tell me if this is going to cause any issues.

1st. We want to add our trade(wholesale) customers and products and start using it just for our warehouse location. We would not add inventory at this time (will erpnext let you sell something if stock becomes a negative number?)

2nd. If that runs well for us, we will then inventory our full warehouse. Then whenever our shops need stock from the warehouse we would just make a sales order for that shop and ‘sell’ the stock to that shop. So the inventory would be correct.

3rd. If we see no issues with inventory etc, we would then implement the Point of sale (POS Awesome) in our stores, do full stock take of each store, and the stores would now use stock transfers instead of sales orders.

I know accounting wise this is going to all be wrong, which is fine as long as once the new tax year starts we’ve got fresh data.

Part of the reasoning behind this is currently all our modules are separate using Shopify for online and in-store but then we use another product entirely for our wholesale which is not even connected. That software has been discontinued so we’re in a bit of a mad rush to try and get something up and running for our wholesale operation. I figured that we could start using erpnext JUST for that now, and then implement other features as we become able to do so. Maybe we can turn off inventory tracking for now and turn it back on once we’re in a position to do a stock take? Is that something possible?

We would be using ERPNext’s hosting for this, not hosting ourselves.

Thank you in advance to anyone who’s able to help us.

You can do this. Not the “turn off inventory” part, but the “disregard the inventory module” part. There is an option in Stock Settings to allow negative stock. This can also be configured on a per-item basis. I currently run ERPNext this way since my use case is a bit complicated and needs a lot of custom development to fully handle inventory. So we currently use it to track purchases, deliveries and invoices, while completely ignoring the stock.
Making Sales Orders within your own warehouses is a bit unneccessarily complicated, I think? You can just transfer stock between your warehouse and store as you wish, but maybe I don’t get the nuance of what you want to do.

Come the new year, you can enter your inventory and begin using ERPNext in full.

Your use case is something that ERPNext has been built to work great.

Here’s what I would suggest:

  1. Turn off Perpetual Inventory (Accounts>Company)
  2. Don’t turn on negative stock. For a company such as yours Inventory in Money and Profits. Turning on Negative Stock seems to tell your team that you (or your management) doesn’t care about money. Instead begin with the most accurate (or the least inaccurate) Inventory report and have (as) many people have the ability to correct stock position when they see inaccuracies. Or if they can’t invoice a customer

#1 will ensure that the inaccuracies and the corrections don’t mess up your accounting books. When you turn of Perpetual Inventory you get Periodic Inventory and you will “periodically” make entries for Stock Assets and Stock Expenses by computing this manually using the stock reports from ERPNext.

#2 will set your organization on the road to building a point of reference for inventory (which according to me is the one and only job of an ERP system). You can get more accurate with your inventory and some day/week/month/quarter or year in the future actually be able to turn Perpetual Inventory back on.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Jay

Hello - just curious, what were your problems with the Odoo implementation?

Also: what are your long-term plans for e-commerce? I saw you eventually hope to move to POS Awesome, but I’m referring to your online store. Shopify is a decent shopping cart and ERPNext’s website store isn’t yet as feature rich, are your planning to keep Shopify?

Yeah, keep Shopify. It’s not just for the E Commerce Storefront - Shopify has a ton of integrations. ERPNext has a connector that works with Shopify, so that’s covered, but POS Awesome is definitely the way to go for your retail stores.

Yes, do let us know your experiences with Odoo.

Thanks

Jay

Thanks all for your help and advice. Odoo issues were mainly related to getting it working in any form… We had a number of meetings with the sales team and we were convinced round to using odoo online. We were told the ‘best’ way to do it if we are a smaller business capable of changing our procedures would be to use odoo online without modifications and change our processes to match odoo’s. That way we wouldn’t have any trouble setting things up. But from the start we found trouble. Things like fresh install, create one location and can’t open it in the point of sale. But the error reporting was not clear so would take considerable time to work out. And while we had hired someone to help (and they were fairly useful) it really was not the experience I had expected. Lots of questions were not answered or sometimes were answered wrongly. Odoo support told us the loyalty scheme we use in store (4 points for every euro spent, and every 100 points is a euro discount) was not possible. But I managed to dig around and set it up using their standard loyalty module as it was an option. They told us we would need to pay for a modification…

Honestly just felt like as soon as we signed the years contract (3 months left now and yet to use it for anything) they just dropped their interest fully and everything was purchase a support pack. Which would be ok if the answers support gave us wasn’t always ‘can’t be done, has to be customised’, when many times we found it could be done. I really didn’t think our business model was anything special. We have some stores that sell products, and they all get their stock from our main warehouse. Our main warehouse also sells the same products, in case quantities, wholesale to trade customers. That’s it… We just wanted to sort our inventory out not reinvent the wheel. Other features like accounting, staff etc we would be happy to use later but those main things were the only things we wanted to get right and we honestly felt like Odoo lied to us by saying it could all be done easily in odoo online.

While I’ve only been messing around in the trial version of erpnext it does feel like you can’t easily ‘break’ things like you can in odoo. If you enable something and it needs something else to work it tells you. In Odoo you have to search and search to find out there’s a second checkbox elsewhere you need to enable.

For our wholesale we have been using another invoice/inventory software that recently migrated to a new version. But in their new version they haven’t pulled across old data, and they haven’t kept features that were essential for us. This all happened very suddenly so my team is currently writing invoices out manually with excel. Hence why looking at erpnext and not using anything other than having products with correct pricing so we can invoice customers is my current primary goal. Once we can get that working, we will do a stock take and start to roll it out bit by bit. I live in a very small country with only one provider for POS/ERP etc and the only solution they work with can’t do wholesale. So we have had no choice but to just do things ourselves, which as you can probably tell has been more than frustrating.

Thank you all for your help, it’s much appreciated.

Edit: I feel I should add that my issue isn’t so much with paying anyone to help us. I understand fully that it’s a service. But I felt very misled that we would be able to do it ourselves. Shopify (and before that we have used EPOSNOW) was really no problem for us to just get up and running with products and customers listed. It wasn’t something you can ‘break’ by clicking the wrong button. I understand Odoo and ERPNEXT are much more complete options, but we were led to believe that if we just used odoo online for the purposes we wanted to use it for then it would be just as easy to us which was not the case. Then we found that ALL help required paying for, with no actual guarantee if the help/expert knew the answer as we found out with reference to the loyalty scheme etc.

So currently I am hoping we can get the above setup by ourselves this week so we can invoice customers properly. Then when we decide to implement POS awesome we would definitely look to find someone that could help us implement it and avoid any pitfalls.

If we didn’t use the inventory at all then yep you’re correct we wouldn’t need to do a sale, in fact we wouldn’t need a stock transfer either. Just once we do the inventory or our warehouse, any stock that is taken out to go to our shops would need to be removed from the inventory. But if it was transferred, then it would still register as in stock since we wouldn’t be using ERPNEXT yet in the store it gets transferred to?

Long term plans on e-commerce are limited really. We are primarily brick and mortar stores and a distributor. Online we just have mostly as an ‘extra’. We had planned on using odoo’s online store as it was enough for us. If we go with erpnext then yes we could redesign our shopify store and keep it, or move to woocommerce or any of the other integrations. At the moment I’ve paired down my wishes from everything working beautifully, to just being happy if we can get our inventory running and still sell to customers. Our old provider changing their service without notice has been very frustrating.

I’m not sure I understand. Will you be running different instances of ERPNext in your warehouse and your different stores?

No we would run the same instance. The problem we’ve had is that due to issues with our existing invoicing software we’re having to ‘speedrun’ implementation. So we’re trying to simplify it down. At the moment our invoicing for wholesale customers, and our retail stores are on different systems. As the existing invoicing software has been depreciated, we need to either do it manually using word/excel. Or we need to change to a new software. The idea we’ve got is to start using erpnext just for invoicing wholesale customers. Then start using it also for our retail stores.