[Roadmap] Path to v9

ERPNext
21

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
22

I think having the following features would help retailers like my company improve.

  • SMS Alerts that work like Email Alerts
  • Ability to set SMS/Email Alerts that trigger, let’s say, every Monday, first or last day of month, or “this day last year” etc… to notify people of memories, anniversaries
  • Omni-Channel Retailing (OCR) integration with some third party SaaS
    Thanks for reading
1 Like
23

@jai_kejriwal

“To me, for example, a rock solid accounting module on par or better than Tally is top priority. So we must prioritize, Accounting”

I totally agree that accounting is very important, and its all about prioritisation. For example, in my opinion, something like GL account numbers are basic, and more important than cosmetic features like kanban views. Direct connection to bank accounts would be nice for bank reconciliation, scanning of expense receipts, or financial statement customization. Consolidations etc. Its a long list.

Things like localised payroll, or sales tax reports are different in every region/country. That is why I feel that integration to a strong accounting system like QBO or Xero is a good solution to all the accounting issues. These companies have already dealt with the localisation, and all the accounting issues, and people know and rely on them. Otherwise, we are going to be duplicating a lot of effort, and many things will never happen. Its hard to be an expert in every domain.

Seems to me its all abut prioritisation. Who should determine what is most important, and how? For example, maybe we should give more weight to features that affect every company, rather than a specific industry, which affects a smaller share of the community. Maybe there should be a short term, mid term, and long term plan. (taking dependencies into account). I assume that issues are already prioritised into “urgent” and “nice to have”. Are we incorporating the issues into the road map?

6 Likes
24

I think we can cover the vote process in two ways. There are certainly going to be some enhancements that need $$ to help with covering development, but there is already an active development community in play. I think they just need a bit more focus. I think right now the current pool of developers are working on things that matter to them only, or are fixing issues that pop up. I could certainly be wrong in this assessment, but that is what it feels like to me looking in from the outside.

So the first way - following what I was thinking in my post - is to combine existing and create new git issues for a theme - everything being worked on is in a git issue. Accounting, Human Resources, Selling, Project Management, CRM, Asset Management are all existing modules/features that need improvements to bring them to parity with other existing platforms. @JoEz suggested looking at Apache OfBiz, great idea! Use other platforms for ideas. The first round of issues to vote on should have wide appeal - e.g. the enhancement will help everyone and every jurisdiction, not just one or two areas. There are a number of global industry standards that ERPNext can adopt and follow. That way pretty much any company in any jurisdiction can use the platform.

The second way would be to go and use bounties for harder to reach industries or features that don’t have a super wide appeal. For those businesses that its important for them to have that feature, they should be able to bring some $$ to the table to help. This might not even be a bounty, per se. Maybe they go an hire a programmer! That is the ultimate in paid development.

Moving away from the mechanics of the vote process. While reading more of the posts after my initial one, there does seem to be some consensus on this process. A lot of folks really want to improve and stabilize the existing modules. Not everyone really needs schools or healthcare/medical modules. Why not leave those as apps that can be installed by those who don’t need it? Or at least make it super easy to turn off a module in setup so this it is totally gone/not-visible/not-usable. Right now that is hard to do. Feature bloat slows down development as well.

I second @jai_kejriwal commentary. I am in my first year of implementing ERPNext for my new business. There are things that annoy me, but are not mission critical right now (e.g. payroll process is a current pain point). If it has taken him 3 years, that is a REALLY LONG TIME to fight a tool! I commend him for sticking with the platform for this long.

@jof2jc introduces stability. Love it! It should not take until 8.0.10+ for a new release to be stable and usable. It took until about 7.1.x for the 7.x branch to be stable enough for a prod environment. The release cycle needs to improve. Stability and Reliability are key for ERP platforms. Feature and usability stability are cornerstones. Reduce the clicks and documents it takes to complete a transaction if possible.

@JayRam says pretty much the same thing in his post, especially around upgrades.

So to wrap up, I am going to go out on a limb here and make a specific suggestion:

v8.1 = Stability and documentation release. Fix all the bug issues that are currently open related to either the upgrade to 8.0 or existed in 7.x and have not been addressed. Cross browser compatibility for Frappe would be included here. This release would also include lots of updates to the documentation to get it current with the code. I would recommend this is where we move on my idea of an administrator’s guide. Move technical setup/provisioning documents out of the general user guide.

v8.2 = Accounting Module. ERP is accounting at its core. Let’s put focus and resources into getting the accounting module to beat all rivals (or at least do everything we can think of). Financial reports, chart of accounts, consolidated company financials (for those of us with many companies), etc. There have been lots of discussions in the forum and lots of git issues related to this module.

v8.3 = Human Resources. Again, ERP and HRIS are very important to any company. Employee onboarding, pay, leave/holiday, security of records, employee tax documents delivery, employee acquisition, etc. Similar to v8.2 - make ERP’s HRIS module feature rich to attract lots of customers!

v8.4 = Selling. (any maybe include Buying too here). This is probably where lots of changes to the frappe framework will be needed. The current website module is horrible. Need to move to a content management framework of some kind. A non-technical person should be able to manage the website via ERPNext. There are also lots of needs around how selling integrates with manufacturing, so might need a bit of bleed over here. But either way 8.4 is all about improving the way we use the platform to sell our products and services.

v8.5 = CRM. Lots of suggestions already to bring CRM up to par with other platforms. I really like having it integrated right into my sales cycle, so I am not a fan of going third party.

v8.6 = ? Other modules like schools, project management, etc could be targeted in an 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, etc versions.

v9 = This is probably more of a Frappe release than an ERPNext release. In this release all (or many) of the third party components that are used (e.g. python as an obvious one) are upgraded to current stable. I would assume this would mean changes to existing modules in ERPNext in order to handle the new underlying framework. However no new features here, just changes to existing stable features.

Sorry for long post, that was not my initial intent. Thanks for sticking with me as I got my thoughts out on “paper”.

James

17 Likes
25

I agree with James and others that stability probably needs a bit more of a push than it gets. Likewise version 8 broke dome important features that 7 was fine with in terms of email handling iee showing all css online on many emails and losing the collapsing of previous conversations. In these cases there are github issues and pull releases by the community but for whatever reason they are incomplete and not included in master. But still they are a regression.

Likewise I see issues with v8 with deleting multiple objects at once and get errors with permissions in doing so. This should not happen and I’m wary of demoing to my staff until annoying bugs like this are fixed.

Again I would agree with a QBO connector at least on terms of my company’s own requirements.

It has to be said Odoo is no better with releasing a major new version and then having to wait 2 to 3 months at least before its close to be production stable but we can be better than them :wink:

4 Likes
26

For our use case (and I imagine we’re not that special), being able to copy&paste multiple items from spreadsheets into list views (e.g.: “items in BOM”) would be a game-changer.

Having to manually add 200…300 rows per BOM is no joke after the second/third one you make :wink:

There’s already a thread about this:

And a Github issue:

Looking forward to all the v9 goodies!

27

What is important now is the stability and reliability of the features we already have.For example the CASHFLOW report is in a complete mess.It is never correct.How can we leave such issue and be multiply features.
Because accounting and HR is central to ERP,I will want effort to be geared toward solidifying these two areas which is common to all that use ERPnext.The foundation should review all the issues raised and pick important ones that have general application.
Accounting reporting in ERPNEXT is poor.The poverty is primarily due to non usage of numbering in the COA.
Pls let make ERPNEXT great by paying attention to already existing features.
Thanks

5 Likes
28

reducing the number of open issues (1043 at the time of writing this) has been discussed in yesterday’s weekly meeting of the ERPNext Foundation members.
Action is about to get start in this regards. We’re going to start to categorize (by related Module, using github labels) the open issues at first (which we will need help from the Community with). I’ll keep you posted here (actually will start a new topic)

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29

I would be glad to help in this regard. Especially if we can not only tag/label the issues by module or feature but them also start the process of tagging them to a release candidate per my suggestion earlier today.

30

great, thanks, I’ll keep you in the loop then.

For now the idea was to first label issues by Module getting them into some sort of order as a first step.

another outcome from the aforementioned meeting was to design a development roadmap (which I think is based on what has been discussed in this topic here). This may be prioritizing the open issues then as well I think. We’ll keep you up to speed with developments in that regards as well.

…

If anyone is interested in more directly influencing the direction things are going, feel free to join the foundation (for now individual membership is USD 200/year).

There is an online meeting doing down each Thursday. From my experience so far … the one who speaks out in those meetings has a good chance of steering the project.

3 Likes
31

I think like it has been mentioned before:

1. Close a lot of open issues - the number just keeps increasing.
2. Instead of focusing on new features major features, the current features really need to be fixed.
3. I am still using V6 because v7 changed too many things that would break in my setup, and v8 won’t be any better. I really do not want to upgrade and change my configuration only to find the software full of new issues.

5 Likes
32

Wold be handy to get an easy way to update the chart of accounts trough the
Charts.erpnext.com

with an easy downloadable format + upload it to erpnext.

33

Very good ideas and we are available to contribute

34

Google Apps - GSuite integration can help many users.

3 Likes
35

Hello,

Here are our list.

  1. ERPNext Mobile APP with Notification and Integration with Contact, Calendar
  2. GIS - Real time Location of Item, Warehouse, Customer
  3. AI - Email alert based on entered data and meaning full result
  4. Custom Theme for desk and website
  5. Scheme, Discounts and Claim Management for Customer, Distributor, Supplier.

Thanks,
Sam

10 Likes
36

Hi,
I understand ERPNet is targeted for MSME’s. I believe the following will attract a lot of micro-small industries to ERPNext.

  1. Why not start with a flexible HR Module - something every organisation needs.
  2. Simple App creator - This should help implementors/ users to create simple forms to enter data.
  3. Simple report generator - select any data filter and formulas to compute results on a dashboard.

App and report generators can drastically reduce the time and costs involved in implementation for any module and further enhance the flexibility of ERPNext.

2 Likes
37

I like the idea of an app creator!

Take a look at what they have on October: Builder plugin - October CMS

We have been using this @ratskin in particular. Some type of port from October to Frappe would be awesome.
https://octobercms.com/blog/post/say-hello-builder

Also for the Frappe website, wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a look at October for some inspiration. Overall a great platform

4 Likes
38

gl report should have group by party

39

One of the Most Important feature ( i guess will be required by all of us ) is the ability for the same customer to be a supplier without making 2 accounts for the same company, as i might be doing some contracting job for company X but for some reason i took some materials from company X in terms of a Debit note, so i could add these materials as bought from company X as a supplier and still my customer at the same time.

6 Likes
40

that’s great. The easiest way to get started (assuming you are new in this) would be to dive into the open issues and see whether you can fix anything.

2 Likes