[Roadmap] Path to v9

Hi there, here is my list:

Major Refactoring:

  • Primary key (name) as auto increment identity field

  • Link input like <select><option> html tag, something like select2 or selectize or bootstrap-select

  • job scheduler refactoring, in order to be able to set jobs in a cron like format i.e: 15 06 02 Jan *, 30 22 * * Mon,Wed,Fri, would be possible to use rq-scheduler

  • Grand Child (there was a PR, but closed without merge)

Other features:

  • Show/hide dashboard and help, based on roles and permissions

  • Move barcode field to an Item Barcode table and have all related search looking to new child table.

  • [UX] Set filters width in reports

  • [UX] Add horizontal border in writable fields for mobile view

  • [UX] What about to have more tabular views? Actually, in Doctype like Item its needed to scroll down a lot to find infos, probably with tabs would be better, kind of odoo interface, see pic:


It seems all for now, i’ll update if other ideas will rise up …

Thx for reading

4 Likes

hi,

Here’s my ideas list of enhancements I hope one day could exist in frappe/erpnext :

1. GroupBy on search

Something like the image

2. Groupby on edit

Imagine an SO with 500 lines (without excel :slight_smile: ). So the better way is to group by (chapters, family, type or any other field)

example 1

or even better

3. GSuite Integration

For example, our HR need to print a contract document to every new employee. Almost all information is already in ERPNEXT, so would be good to just select a template document in erpnext and create a new document with DocType filed data.
The link to gsuite document could be saved as an attachment (only link not the data).

This is different from using frappe print formats, because the document need to be editable.

4. Item Variant creation

In Orders/quotations you can create a new item if it doesn’t exist during order/quote creation, but you can’t create a new variant of a item template.

I’ve already opened and issue in github https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/issues/8435

These are only ideas, please don’t think “another guy just asking new things”, I know there is time limits for everyone.

Thanks

5 Likes

Update versions of upstream projects

  • Track projects used in frappe and their versions. e.g. Python, fullcalendar, summernote, etc.
  • Have a plan to upgrade projects used in frappe. e.g Python 2.7 to 3.5, fullcalendar 3.0.1 to 3.3.1, etc.
3 Likes

Hi all
I will enter directly what i thought is needed in erpnext.

1 - Communication with IOT devices.
2 - Communication with industrial materials( weightbridge, biometric devices, ports,…).
3 - more advanced configurations in hr module also editable payslip to customize it.

Regards

4 Likes

Hello,

For me, the most wanted feature and the only thing that is blocking the full implementation of erpnext in my company is the hability to deal with multiple due dates on purchase and sales, as described here [Feature Request] Multiple due dates in the same invoice · Issue #6301 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub apparently is something that will please a lot of people

Other than that, production order should have a quicker way to start and finish, the current cycle takes a lot of time and is almost impossible to deal with 1000 orders/day (my case), this was discussed on Manufacturing process

Multiple actions should be awesome too, for example approve, close, workflow transitions, start or finish production orders and so on.

Decimal separator according to language option, the decimal separator works fine using the erpnext, but importing can be a mess, the values are considered without the separator, it confuses some users and can cause problems if not checked after import.

CSV separator according to language setup too, it can be painfull, mainly to final users, because it is necessary to import as a text file and go trough a menu on excel or libreoffice to choose codification, separator, etc. If I configure the default separator as “,” and not “;” I have to go trough the same menu to open local files, this was suggested here [enhancement] option to choose separator on csv files · Issue #8520 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub

Thanks

3 Likes

All comments/suggestions to date all sound good, but there are also a great many git issues listed in the frappe and erpnext repositories that should seriously be considered. Some of them are quite old, but still very valid. Let’s not loose sight of them!

One thing I struggle with is what is on the real published road map. My suggestion would be to tag the issues we think we want in a specific version (e.g. 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.0, 9.1, etc.) and then have the community vote on them and then the ones that get the most votes are prioritized. I am thinking that there are a number of “themes” in the various old issues that could be combined and worked on for minor versions. One thing that comes to mind is a collection of asset management issues could be combined into one minor release. Major releases get big new features like the medical/healthcare module or big framework updates (like a move to python 3.5) and minor releases include new/updated features to existing modules. There is nothing wrong with going to 8.10 if there are 10 modules that need a bit of work! Human Resources has a number of git issues as a theme for example as well (e.g. lots of folks asking for payroll improvements :wink: )

I think that there needs to be a way to support n-1 version for some period of time as well. Not everyone can upgrade right away. So in the recent cycle, there was supposed to be a bench command to keep yourself on the 7.x branch, but it was never implemented. Can we see about doing issue/bug issues only in the n-1 version for say 6 to 9 months? Then those that have custom apps still get a bit of time to upgrade their code to work on newer platform version.

I would like to see improvements in the release cycle. For example, when a PR/Commit is updated the comments give little to no information as to what was either added or fixed. An update of “Minor Fix” means absolutely nothing. Every PR/Commit should be linked to a git issue that provides context and the code that was changed. This happens haphazardly today. Git issues should then be closed quickly to keep the listing clean of current real open ones and not a smattering of ones that are not really open any more, but have not been closed. There should also be a period of time where code is added to develop branch that needs to be tested. There have been a number of times where I have put in a git issue for a bug to see it fixed and closed and merged to master to find that the “fix” did not fix. I never had the chance to test to see if it was fixed from my end before it went to master branch. In time they eventually get “fixed”, but outside of the original git issue.

Documentation must keep up with the changes to code! Right now there are a good deal of discrepancies between what is in code vs what is documented. I would suggest that you all change the PR/Commit acceptance process that says if your code changes behavior then there needs to be a corresponding documentation update/commit included in the PR. This will, of course, slow down the deployment of new code, but will greatly enhance the platform as documentation will always match the code.

So… Any of this could be implemented outside of v9.x. I just thought this thread about going to 9.x was a good place to open up commentary on the process of how things are done.

Thanks
James

19 Likes

QBO integration

1 Like

good idea. I guess we’d have to come up with a system to vote for issues then though. any idea?

Money is a strong vote, so I thought maybe putting bounties on these issued would be a way to go …
just it’s much harder to motivate to do so (which is one of the issues we are dealing with as a community anyway). So I’d say figuring out such a mechanism would be a big step forward.

potential problems with bounties may be …

  1. feature A has actual costs of $100, but gets $200 on it. What happens with the remainder
  2. how can we motivate ppl to pull out their wallet (one way could be to allow very low amounts which may increase number of backers (and therefore increase engagement generally. But I think bountysource,com has a minimum of USD 30.- which may be a hurdle many won’t jump over)?

EDIT: just noted that the minimum at bountysource seems to be USD 15. That may be low enough. I think though it needs strong efforts by someone steering such a project (and strong support from the Community/Foundation/Frappe) for that.

3 Likes

I echo @James_Robertson thoughts. While we all would love more features, we should seriously consider making a dent in the issues list.

We (our company) are into year three of implementing the ERP in our organization and it’s not been a simple transition for us to transfer from our legacy systems to ERPNext. There are several improvements in GitHub issues to really fix/improve the experience of the product as it stands.

In addition, I believe that the community must vote on the importance of modules.

  1. To me, for example, a rock solid accounting module on par or better than Tally is top priority. So we must prioritize, Accounting, Selling etc. If we think we are already there, we need some marketing material that benchmarks against the leaders. For example, as a CRM, even a newcomer such as Freshsales offers a better CRM only experience. It is also not reasonable for us to be at market leader feature parity for all modules immediately. Hence the need for prioritization.

  2. Better documentation for self managed hosting is becoming crucial for those companies who must customize ERPNext as this basically makes the option of hosting with ERPNext a non-starter. Here, data backup, replication and disaster recovery are the most important issues. We are currently following some helpful instructions from @vrms in one his posts. Thank you.

  3. There is serious need of the freelance ecosystem to develop quickly. The developer videos were a great beginning and need to be expanded.

Some of these are not directly pertinent to the subject thread but still relevant as we discuss taking on new work.

@rmehta Everytime we integrate new apps to core, aren’t we (ERPNext) taking on a serious burden as far as regressions are concerned. Won’t this really add to issue bloat on GitHub?

All in all, having just typed this out, I realize how much this project has grown and achieved. It also makes me feel proud that an Indian company has started a top quality open source project and is capturing mind and market share globally.

Kudos and cheers.

4 Likes

What do you mean by “major release”?

As of now Frappe/ERPNext seem to be loosely SemVer-compliant, I mean sometimes major version change breaks backward compatibility, sometimes it doesn’t. I think it makes sense to become strictly compliant to SemVer, but then releasing major versions bimonthly is becoming titanic burden obviously.

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+1 to @strixaluco

I think the project may need to go slow but stable/steady instead of aiming for rapid progress (if that is what major releases every 2 months stands for)

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In this case I didn’t necessarily mean slowing down the development pace, even though stability is crucial for ERP. Just was wondering about term definitions, as they seem to be different for each of us here.

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Rather than pushing quick major version release, I would prefer to focus on end-user experience,reliability and to fit business standard practice…

  1. Implementing an ERP is not ‘that easy’ in most cases…it takes time for businesses to adopt it. The same thing with upgrading.
  2. I’m seeing most of us tend to create ‘front-end’ features but pay less attention on the essence of an ERP system…Some of the essences is accurate costing… There’s still some lacks in costing e.g. FIFO doesn’t consider per batch-id costing. Another example, different rate between Purchase Receipt and Purchase Invoice… Purchase invoice then must update stock valuation…
  3. Flexible financial reporting engine for end-users to get easily to play with their data from different views.
  4. Need enhancement on production and manufacturing areas like been discussed many times in this forum.
  5. UI consistency is important in my opinion for users…changing UI continuously, renaming doctype etc…makes confusion…

Most end-users are looking for stable, accurate, easy and efficient system (less data entry), fast access to important information and flexible reporting

10 Likes

My wish list is slightly different. I wish that existing features scale up to a level of robustness and predictability before we introduce new features. So maybe the path to version 9 meanders through a version 8.5 and we bring existing features up to speed and then focus on version 9. Here are the set of things, I would want to see in version 8.5:

  1. Sub Contracting: You now have to create a separate document for each item that you need to sub contract. Even when you have multiple Items in a PO all of which need to go to the same Sub Contractor, or when you have multiple POs on the Same Sub Contractor, the current configuration does not allow you to aggregate all items destined for the same sub-contractor together. This needs to be fixed.

  2. Communication: Communication feature that was working in a previous version does not work the way it is supposed to and intended to.

  3. Version Upgrades: Version Upgrades have to get smoother. I think we did a much better job with version 7. If on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being totally seamless and 1 being totally troublesome, I’d give Version 7 a grade of 8 on 10. Version 8? About a 5 on 10.

These are just some of the things that is annoying my customers. I’m sure there are many of these with the community. Maybe we should list all of them and focus on the top 20 for version 8.5.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but a big part of implementing an ERP system is predictability, many of my customers would happily sacrifice new features for predictability and robustness.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t build new features and attract new customers. But every once in a while we need to consolidate and focus on delivering better value to our existing customers. In my opinion, we need to spend some time on consolidation now!

A tedious feature (#1 above), things that worked before, but don’t work anymore (#2 above) and a heck of a lot of intervention to manage upgrades in version (#3 above) are the one’s we need to focus on.

After all, all of us definitely believe staunchly in the philosophy “ERPNext is open source .AND. excellent quality”. We need to be that (excellent quality) if we want to build “The Best Darned ERP in the World”.

Thanks

Jay

11 Likes

+1 to that (something one tends to forget when looking at things and possibilities from an inside perspective)

Hello @rmehta

It’s Good if you can increase capability to set more than 3 columns in List view. So we can display as much as possible information from documents to list view. that will be helpful to user.

Thanks,
Hardik Gadesha

1 Like

for me we should include the following things
1, multiple company consolidated financial reports must be added based on IFRS standards
2, if we could improve the project management system like Microsoft project by adding equipment allocation system it will be very nice
3, if we can add planning for financial reports and sales and purchase system it will be very helpfull.thanks

3 Likes

Ppl, posting just as a source of “inspiration” to grab future features, have a look at:

Apache ofBiz

Wow @rmehta !! Sounds good.

I would like to suggest, might be not proposed by anyone. Might be considered or not.

I would like to draw attention on Loggin into ERPNext module. ERP which is very confidential, the management system of any organization. If accessed by some person who is not authenticated or not having the responsibility to use ERP without authorization. Even though, got login information like username and password with anyway. In short, If ERP isn’t in safe hand.

He can do whatever wants to do. I would like to draw attention here on “Two-Step Authentication”

If enabled “Two-Step Authentication” from ‘Setup’ and ‘enabled SMS Gateway’, can do their job to retrieve OTP on their registered mobile no. If not apply to all users, at least can be enabled on “Administrator” or administrator can set the module can be accessed to users or not. Then, It’s up to user whether they use “2-way authentication” or not.

This would definitely enhance one extra layer of security. By keeping in mind, ERP is confidential and can be stopped any not authorized person to access desk.

7 Likes