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SoftOpen

ERPNext

GPLv3

Finance, stock and manufacturing on one system you own.

Practice led by Nadia Cheng, Practice Director, ERPNext

What ERPNext is

ERPNext is a full enterprise resource planning system: general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, stock and warehousing, purchasing, sales, manufacturing, projects and HR. It is the most complete open-source ERP available, and it is the platform we deploy most. Our ERPNext practice is the largest of the five, at forty-one people.

Who it suits

  • Manufacturers and distributors running finance on a legacy ERP whose vendor has been acquired, or whose support is ending
  • Organisations between £5m and £150m turnover, where a tier-one ERP is disproportionate and a small-business package has stopped fitting
  • Finance teams whose month-end depends on a spreadsheet estate that has quietly become load-bearing
  • Anyone who needs their ERP data in their own database, in their own infrastructure

And who it does not

ERPNext is a poor fit if you need deep vertical functionality that only a specialist system has — pharmaceutical batch genealogy to full regulatory depth, or process manufacturing with complex co-product yields. We will tell you that at the scoping call rather than three months in.

What we do with it

Our ERPNext work

Configuration is the project. The install is an afternoon.

Process discovery and fit assessment

Before anything is deployed we map your actual processes against standard ERPNext and produce a written fit assessment: what works as standard, what needs configuration, what needs an extension, and what you should change about the process instead. The gaps are the valuable part.

Deployment to your cloud or ours

Separate development, test and production environments, built with infrastructure-as-code so they are reproducible rather than hand-assembled. Your AWS account or our managed platform — the deployment is identical either way.

Configuration of the whole chart

Company structure, chart of accounts, tax templates, item masters, warehouses, BOMs, workflows and approval routing, configured against how you actually work rather than against the demo data.

Migration with reconciliation evidence

Opening balances, master data and transaction history from your legacy ERP or spreadsheet estate, with a reconciliation report at every dry run. A migration is finished when your finance team agrees the totals, not when the load completes.

Go-live support and hypercare

A named team on site or on call through go-live and for a defined hypercare period afterwards. The first month-end on a new ERP is the one that matters, and we plan for it explicitly.

Shape of the work

How an engagement runs

  1. Discovery

    Process mapping and written fit assessment. 5–8 days.

  2. Build

    Environments, configuration, workflows, extensions where genuinely needed.

  3. Migration

    Profiling, mapping, and at least two dry runs at production volume.

  4. UAT

    Your team, your data, your processes. Scripted and evidenced.

  5. Go-live and hypercare

    Cutover, then a defined period of elevated support.

What it connects to

  • Banking feeds and payment files (BACS, SEPA)
  • Making Tax Digital submissions
  • EDI with trading partners
  • Existing CRM, WMS or MES via REST
  • Single sign-on through SAML or OIDC
  • Reporting into Grafana or a warehouse

The honest bit

ERPNext is developed by an independent open-source project under GPLv3. We are not its authors and we do not control its roadmap. We can tell you exactly what it does today, we can deploy and support the current stable release, and we can build an extension if you need something it does not do. What we will not do is give you a date for an upstream feature — including one that has been publicly discussed.

The ERPNext project ↗

In practice

A ERPNext engagement

Precision engineering · ERPNext

Month-end close cut from eleven working days to four

ERPNext replacing a legacy ERP and a spreadsheet estate across two sites, with three years of transaction history migrated and reconciled.

Brightforge Engineering

At a glance

Working days to close
11 → 4
Sites consolidated
2
Transactions migrated
3 years
Total engagement
68 days
All case studies

Services that go with it

Deployment & configuration

Design, deploy and configure an open-source platform against how your organisation actually works.

How it works

Data migration

Profiling, mapping, dry runs at production volume, and reconciliation reporting at every stage.

How it works

Managed hosting

Patching, backups with tested restores, monitoring and upgrades — in your cloud account or ours.

How it works

Support & maintenance

Annual support against a deployed platform, with response targets and a quarterly review.

How it works

Talk to the ERPNext practice

A scoping conversation with someone who works on this platform every day, not an account manager.

Book an assessmentSee our rates