Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog

Published April 29th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran

Another look at Web-ERP

Phil Daintree (the developer of WEB-ERP posted a comment to my previous Open Source Accounting Apps post. His comment is reproduced below…

I developed web-erp, open-accounting is a development of web-erp with multi-language support. Interested in your assessment of my system. Creating the order means there is no other entries to be made to create the invoice. It is a two or three click exercise once the items to be invoiced have been selected on the order. The system appears geared around physical inventory, although I would encourage you to explore “dummy” items which allow for service entries like time to be invoiced.

It is in use by at least one Australian company and handles Australian GST even allowing for some of the oddities with food etc.

In response to his feedback, I went back and had another look at the system. Bear in mind that I’m evaluting Web-ERP (and the other systems as well) from the perspective of a service based business.

Web-ERP certainly seems to be able to meet all of the tax invoice requirements, for Australian GST. Of course, given that it was developed in NZ, and our GST is virtually identical to yours that shouldn’t really surprise me I guess.

Having spent a little bit more time with it, the invoicing process isn’t quite as unfriendly as it first seems, but it is still fairly cumbersome for a service based business. In the situation I’m looking at you’d raise the invoice after the job has been completed, or immediately prior to commencing the job. In either instance its fairly cumbersome to have to enter the job as an order, then turn it into an invoice. I’ll run through the ordering/invoicing process to give you an idea where my concerns lie…

1) Selection of a customer, and searching/selection of products are both very flexible and very good within the constraints of a web application.
2) At the point where the order has been created in full there is a button “Enter Delivery Details and Confirm Order”. In a primarily service based business, you’ll rarely need delivery details, so it’d be nice to be able to Confirm the order there and then. Ideally, it would be nice to confirm the order and process it in full as an invoice there and then.
3) The top portion of the delivery details screen makes a good double check to ensure that what you’ve entered in previous stages is correct, but the delivery details are pretty unnecessary for a service based business. In the demo system some of the customers don’t have delivery addresses configured, which makes the usage of this screen a little more tedious because the validation requires entry of delivery details.
4) For a service based business, the next screen is unnecessary, because we’d always want to “Confirm Order Delivery Quantities and Produce Invoice”.
5) Confirming quantities and handling back orders, is again something that a service based business rarely needs to worry about, but at least at this point we can click on “Process Invoice” without any further entry and we’re done.

From my point of view, Web-ERP is a very well developed system, which a lot of useful features. However, in some respects the features that would make it useful to a lot of people (i.e. order entry, back orders, etc) are unnecessary in the environment that I’m looking at, and seem to get in the way a little. That’s not to say its not a good system, just when matched against my requirements, its not an ideal fit. The same can be said for virtually all of the systems I looked at in my earlier post. They’re all fairly good systems in their own right, but none was an ideal fit to my requirements.

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