What is the mobile future of Frappe & ERPNext?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what an ideal ERP should look like, especially to decision-makers and shareholders. For now the answer seems quite obvious: mobile and offline first, graphical, simple UI and easy documentation.

I would like to know what plans and ideas @rmehta and the Frappe team have so far. The Foundation and Community will also be important to achieving this.

Thank you

I’m very new to the ERPNext community, but I’m not sure I see the value in an offline, mobile-first ERP platform.

For starters, ERPNext is built from the bottom up to be multiuser, bringing many people in an organization together over the same business data. That’s something you can only get with an online system. If you take that away, I’m not sure what you have left.

There are potential exceptions to this, of course, and the point of sale system is I think a really great example where offline makes sense. Unlike comprehensive ERP systems, PoS systems have a narrow purpose, focused on making one very specific task very quick and very easy. Rather than conceptualizing the entire platform as offline and interface-oriented, it seems to me much more beneficial to design custom-tailored applications with very specific use cases on top of the ERP system, just like the PoS system does.

Good point. Not everything can be offline first, but slot can. Reports for instance, allowing people to see what’s happening with their businesses in the go. Offline capable dashboards, chat, user management, approvals. The prospects are motivating.

I think you might be using “offline” to mean something different than I understand it. How could chat be offline?

For decision makers, reports take priority. For that we need to think of how to best present reports in a mobile format. Also, offline, to me, as a decision maker in my small organisation, is not that important. Moreover, this is not really Frappe or Rushabh’s “responsibility”. We are exploring the idea of implementing custom reports and then creating a custom app to consume those via REST. We will be using a local App Shop to build this simple app. I will be happy to share this work once it is complete.

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I agree completely. To my mind, a real strength of ERPNext is its clean and unified interface, organized around universal categories like doctypes, doc lists, reports, etc.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for very specialized interfaces, but those should be layered on top of the core architecture, using ERPNext’s very solid API. When these interfaces are useful to others (like the PoS), it’s great to include them in the core codebase. But, for organization-specific needs, it’s actually not particularly difficult to build a custom application for those purposes (whether web, mobile, desktop, or whatever).

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