I’ve been watching the ERPNext project for a while, I’ve even downloaded and played with a few prior versions in the past. We operate a couple of businesses, one in manufacturing the other in service, and we’ve been running on Odoo for a while. But, as Odoo seems to be driving more features up into their enterprise platform and the way they handle billing for each module is making staying with them challenging.
So we’ve decided to start playing around with ERPNext 11 in a sandbox and see if we can justify moving our operation over to a different platform. My gut tells me we can.
We’re going to be playing around with both trying to host multiple companies in one install, as well as seeing if we need to maintain multiple installations for customization purposes. My big question is regarding payment gateways. Each company has its own payment accounts via Paypal and Braintree. Can you have multiple of the same kind of payment gateway setup in a single ERPNext install and then have the appropriate company use the correct one when sending out invoices? I don’t want to waste a ton of time playing with that scenario if it’s not possible.
Currently out of the box, ERPNext supports payment gateways like PayPal etc. However, one site currently can link to only one gateway account at a time out of the box.
Hi Chris and welcome to ERPNext! We have a similar situation and have started a project to handle it that we call Multi-website. We had a great community member working on it, but another and more urgent problem forced us to reassign him. We hope to have him working on it again soon. I feel pretty certain that it would meet your needs, but it will be several months before it is built, tested and merged.
@MichaelPinkowski, thank you for the reply. One of the big appeals to being able to run all of the companies “under one roof” is to simplify accounting and management between the company entities.
Functionally, we have one company that owns the majority share of each of our subsidiaries. There are a few of us that work within that organization that manage various aspects of the subsidiary companies. So being able to have user permissions which permit work across all entities, while restricting other users to specific company data would be great, just to save having to log in and out of each company installation. Also for those of us that work across the various companies, being able to have a birds-eye-view of what’s going on and making sure transactions between the companies are present and reconciled would just be an incredible time saver.
But if we host multiple companies within one installation we need to be able to keep payment separate. Each subsidiary company has the same kind of payment processors/acquirers, but separate accounts.
I’d really like to hear more about the Multi-Website feature. Is there a running thread about it on the forum here? I assume if we started with individual site installations for each company, would it be possible to merge them into a single install later through a data import?