Hello everyone, I hope all of you’re doing a great job.
I was exploring a tool that can help me to generate sales invoices based on the subscription model. I found ERPNext, and have tried installing it on the localhost. To be precise, my mom operates a mini-restaurant (it may apply to any business like groceries, milk, newspaper or any kind of daily consumables). Actually, students mess.
Where a student joins us by purchasing a subscription, a monthly subscription, let’s suppose ₹4000 per month, which includes 2 diets off(vacation for us). If I calculate, per diet pricing for 58 diets, it is around ₹69, rounding off ₹70 per diet. But, If a student does not join us as a subscription, we charge ₹80 per diet.
All accounting software measurably fails here in this type of accounting management, might be I’m wrong or illiterate. I have played a lot with subscription feature, auto-generated invoice feature, sales invoice, everything. But, I failed and at last, I’m seeking everyone’s help. I found ERPNext easy to adopt, but quite tricky.
What I expect is a monthly invoice generated only for what student diet consumed, I mean if some students consumed 50 diets and not 58 diets, it means the invoice should be of sum ~3500 instead of 4000. I tried understanding all documents got to know about prorate pricing but couldn’t figure out, how to achieve this. Consider me as a noob, just 2 days back I got to know about ERPNext.
Perhaps the subscription may not be correct to meet this requirement. The subscription plan in ERPNext works the same way as a normal subscription plan wherein you pay a fixed fee depending on the plan which then posts an invoice after a certain interval (usually 30 days).
Since you need to also factor in the no. of meals taken, the subscription feature wouldn’t be the best approach unless there’s a custom logic written for it. If we take Netflix as an example, I still need to pay the entire amount irrespective of how many days during the subscription period it is actually being used.
The simplest way would be to tag a price list at the customer level (for veg or non-veg) meal and then multiply that by the quantity.
What you can automate is creating Auto-repeat for Sales Order wherein you can have the order published on a monthly basis and then generate the invoice on actuals.
Perhaps someone else can suggest some better way to approach this.
You helped me to understand, how subscription module works with ERPNext with Netflix example, I agree one part of a subscription is that way (certain fixed days). I’m not a coder by the way, but a 10+1 Commerce student (just started learning financial accounting).
Something meaning have to be here, or we’re missing something, I’ve seen subscription setting have an option, i.e. Pro-rate basis, which is ideally my mom’s mess use-case, hence that’s why I tried to learn via documents, discussion and lot more, but there is no clarity over this:
Can anyone help me with workflow, I should adopt for my mom. She marks present every day for the students, who have taken their meal and one who not. I’ve seen in videos about the attendance system also an in-built solution with ERPNext.
What I personally believe, I think I’ve reached my end of research and got a product who can do this simply, but due to lack of education with ERPNext, I need your support.
Any help is appreciated. I would like to ask, how subscription-based business use ERPNext for billing. Asking for a prorate basis and Flat subscription fee.
