We were looking into ERPNext to serve as the main system for a Non-Profit, So I was liking around did anyone invested in this before?
We are willing to fund some efforts regarding the matter.
Basically what we are looking for is outlined here:
I’ve used ERPNext to manage a non-profit. You might have some very specific needs in mind, but for our purposes it was ready to go right out of the box.
If you can say more specifically what you need the program to do, you’ll likely get more specific answers. Apart from some terminology, nothing in the document you linked jumps out at me as substantively different from how an ERP would support a for-profit company.
Thanks for sharing.
For starters the main thing we stumbled upon is naming conventions. - Profit & loss etc…
- Also Tracking Expenses as Expenses not via Expense Claims WO relying on Journal entry knowledge.
- Registering Donations & Grants as income. WO relying on Journal entry knowledge.
Thanks for the added details; they’re helpful.
On the expense tracking side, I don’t see much difference between for-profit and non-profit companies. Both track purchase invoices, payroll, subscriptions, etc. Non-profits often have to keep their various funding lines separate, but for-profit companies sometimes do that too. ERPNext handles all of that with projects, accounting dimensions, and cost centers. It all works very elegantly, in my opinion.
Expense claims are more specific. They’re used to reimburse employees for out of pocket expenses, and they would either apply or not as per your financial policy.
In general, it’s going to be tough to run any ERP without at least some use of Journal Entries. It’s one of the simpler doctypes, and generally it serves as the fallback when more specific doctypes don’t fit. Is the concern that you’d want people to be able to enter this information in without having to know anything about your chart of accounts? One option would be to write a very simple and very specialized set of doc types that generate appropriate Journal Entries on the backend. For maintenance reasons, I don’t usually recommend customization, but this could all be done quite easily on the client side.
The biggest question, in my opinion, is going to be financial reporting. Reporting requirements vary dramatically for non-profits across contexts, often requiring very specialized reports. Again, though, custom reports are relatively low maintenance and this low risk.
In any case, I don’t see many barriers. Feel free to ask more questions as they come up, though! We’re always happy to help.
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