I’ve been using ERP Next for a while and have it pretty much customized how I need it. My problem is that we’re a contract Engineering company, as well as manufacturing. Therefore, a lot of what we quote and work on are just projects, and not Items, so the Manufacturing module does us no good on these. We generally use fixed amounts for Engineering projects, and not bill by the hour.
What I’m hoping is that the Project module can be integrated into the sales flow like Manufacturing is. Ideally I’d like to be able to push/pull a sales order into projects, and have the sales order lines be the Tasks, and have the Project Estimated cost come from the Sales Order amount.
Then when the project is completed, link it back to invoicing, where I can Invoice for the Sales Order amount and/or billable hours. I think the Gross Margin parts of a Project needs to be looked at too, I have no idea how it works, Estimated Costs seems to do nothing.
We do this all manually right now but it would be nice to improve the flow so it just worked in the system.
This would allow us to streamline our contract engineering services.
This functionality has come a LONG way since my original post and is almost perfect. ERPNext in general has gotten much much better recently.
I have one more request though, in that if a Timesheet is created and it’s not billable the costing amount doesn’t show up in the Project or Task. If an employee submits a Timesheet against both or either of these, the cost should be associated with that Project/Task even if it’s not billable. The company is still taking on a cost.
Also, if a Sales Invoice is linked to a Project, that billing amount should show up in the Project, and be used to calculate the Margin, and Margin %.
I do a lot of fixed cost Projects, so the time is not billable and I lost all Margin traceability. With these two changes I could also see Margin and Margin % for fixed cost Projects, and maintain the functionality of the billable projects as well.